Amid Democrats’ six-week shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, President Donald Trump has deployed ICE agents to airports to assist in “crowd control, logistics, entrance and exit security, and identity verification,” according to a White House press release on March 30.
The DHS shutdown began on Feb. 13 after Congress’s failure to come to an agreement on budgeting for the fiscal year 2025-26, despite an extended funding window. Democrats bargained for DHS to reopen under certain circumstances, such as in H.R. 7481, which called for DHS to resume all programs and organizations except for ICE and CBP.
According to the White House, more than 100,000 DHS employees, including 60,000 TSA agents, have been working without paychecks, leading to “skyrocketing resignations” and “massive callouts.”
The White House calls this a result of Democrats’ “reckless decision to prioritize criminal illegal aliens over American citizens.”
Trump, in a press release on March 27, directed newly-appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown.”
“Mr. President, I rise to urge my colleagues to end the reckless Democratic shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in a plea to senate democrats to end the shutdown. “This shutdown has caused chaos at our airports, delayed assistance to communities hit by disasters, and forced thousands of essential frontline employees at TSA, at the Coast Guard, at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, to work without any guarantee of when they will be paid.”
Just one week into the shutdown, DHS announced three measures to be taken to mitigate the effects of a budget freeze. DHS stopped all non-disaster-related FEMA response efforts to “prioritize disaster response,” stopped CBP’s Global Entry service, and suspended all police escorts at airports for congressmembers and their families.
The current DHS shutdown is the longest in U.S. history.
