An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has claimed the department had no idea they would be deployed on a new operation.
Donald Trump's team has placed ICE agents in airports across the country to assist the Transportation Security Administration during the Department of Homeland Security's shutdown. TSA employees have been increasingly absent as the shutdown affects their pay, with about 3,400 TSA agents calling out of work on Sunday, according to BBC.
Republicans and Democrats have yet to find an agreeable fix to the DHS bill, which so far includes funding for ICE agents. Dem representatives have held firm and refused to vote through the current bill proposal.
As a counter to TSA employee callouts, the Trump administration has called in ICE to assist security check-ins. New York's John F. Kennedy Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, Georgia, have seen security check-in queues lasting several hours.
The Atlantic staff writer Nick Miroff claimed that ICE agents currently deployed in airports across the country had no idea they would be aiding the remaining TSA agents. He said, "Well, first, my first thought was, This isn’t gonna help.
"Second was that this is consistent with the way the president views ICE as more than like a personal army, kind of like a personal errand corps, where he needs some kind of job done and he wants the optics of toughness, he just calls on ICE, which, once again, is just a gross misunderstanding of what that law-enforcement agency’s role is.
"And so, over the course of last weekend, I initially wrote to some of my ICE sources, and they had no information about it; they had no idea what the operational plans were gonna be."
Miroff went on to suggest that the deployment of ICE at airports is a test of how a similar deployment may affect the midterm elections.
He said, "The kind of darker interpretation of this is that this is a test run for the president to deploy ICE officers to polling stations and intimidate voters in November. That’s yet to be seen.
"But it is a reminder of the way the president views DHS, but specifically ICE, as a kind of personal federal force that is at the beck and call of the president and he can just deploy whenever he needs a tough job done."
Trump ally Steve Bannon has claimed the deployment of ICE in airports is a stress test of how the agency could be used in the midterm elections. "The ICE agents at the airports to help out, and remember they said they're not going to work the x-rays, it's too complicated, they're not trained for it, but they're trained to — wait for it — check IDs," Bannon said on the Monday edition of War Room.
"That's why it's perfect training for the fall of 2026. This is why it's such a brilliant, this is another 5-D chess move for President Trump."