The Transportation Security Administration cannot pay its officers. Lines at major American airports now stretch past two hours. At least 376 screeners have quit since mid-February. And the president’s proposed fix is to replace them with immigration enforcement agents who have no airport security training and whose recent operations have left two American citizens dead.

That is the state of air travel governance in the United States as of Saturday, when President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he would deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to airports as early as Monday if congressional Democrats did not agree to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

“I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before,” Trump wrote, adding that their duties would include “the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”

Five Weeks Without Pay

The partial government shutdown, now in its 36th day, has left nearly 50,000 TSA employees working without pay, according to Al Jazeera. Officers are set to miss a second full paycheque on March 27. Many are already turning to food banks, taking side jobs, and sleeping at airports to save on fuel costs.

The human toll is blunt. “My son, he’s in high school, but he does sports, and he literally had to sit out of one of the sports that he loves so much and is hoping to get a college scholarship in because I can’t afford it,” Rebecca Wolf, a member of the American Federation of Government Employees, told TIME. Cameron Cochems, a TSA union leader in Boise, Idaho, told the Associated Press that officers who remain do so largely because the job market offers no easy exit. “I think more people are staying with the TSA that don’t want to be here,” he said.

Absence rates tell the story in numbers. At Houston Hobby International Airport, 55 percent of scheduled staff called out on March 14, according to DHS figures reported by Al Jazeera. At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International — the world’s busiest airport — absences hit 38 percent midweek. Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental reported wait times of up to 150 minutes on Saturday morning, according to CNN figures cited by TIME.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned on Friday that conditions would deteriorate further. “If a deal isn’t cut, you’re going to see what’s happening today look like child’s play,” he told CNN, according to CNBC. Acting Deputy TSA Administrator Adam Stahl said the agency had “exhausted its options” for keeping checkpoints staffed and warned that smaller airports could close entirely.

Immigration Theatre Meets Airport Security

The proposal to deploy ICE agents to airports collapses under the most basic scrutiny. ICE agents are trained to enforce immigration law, not to screen passengers and luggage for weapons and explosives. TSA screeners spend months learning to read X-ray images and operate body scanners — skills that, as Wolf noted, “take a long time to build.”

Critics pointed to the risk of militarised enforcement in civilian spaces. ICE’s recent track record offers little reassurance: an operation in Minnesota earlier this year resulted in the fatal shootings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, according to France 24 and Al Jazeera. Those deaths are precisely what triggered the current funding standoff. Democrats have demanded reforms to immigration enforcement — including requirements for agents to identify themselves, obtain judicial warrants, and cease racial profiling — as a condition of restoring DHS funding.

Republicans have rejected those demands and refused to vote on TSA funding separately from immigration operations, ensuring that airport screeners remain hostages to a debate about deportation tactics.

A Billionaire’s Band-Aid

In a side development that underscored the absurdity of the moment, Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered on Saturday to personally cover TSA officers’ salaries during the shutdown, according to CNBC. The gesture echoed a similar episode during last year’s record-long government shutdown, when an unnamed donor — later identified as banking heir Timothy Mellon — contributed $130 million toward military pay shortfalls. That donation worked out to roughly $100 per service member, and may have violated the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from spending unappropriated funds, the New York Times reported at the time.

What Comes Next

Both chambers of Congress are scheduled to leave Washington for the first two weeks of April, raising the prospect that the shutdown — and the missed paycheques — could extend well into a third month. The House Committee on Homeland Security has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday on the shutdown’s impact.

The pattern is now familiar: airport screeners have spent nearly half of the past 170 days with their pay held up by politics, according to Fortune — 43 days during last year’s shutdown, four days during a brief lapse earlier this year, and 35 days and counting now. After the last shutdown, TSA attrition spiked 25 percent, and approximately 1,100 officers quit, according to former TSA Administrator John Pistole.

Trump’s threat to send ICE to airports is, at best, a negotiating tactic designed to pressure Democrats. At worst, it is a preview of immigration enforcement expanding into yet another civilian space — this time, the departures hall. Either way, it does nothing to put money in the bank accounts of the people who actually know how to keep airports safe.

Sources