White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked Wednesday whether deportations will decline in the U.S. while ICE agents are assisting with security and staffing problems at several shutdown-affected airports.
President Donald Trump deployed between 100 and 150 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to several major airports to assist the shortage in Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents, after many quit or are unable to work due to the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Leavitt told the Daily Caller White House correspondent Reagan Reese that security lines, have dropped as a result of the move, but the administration is hoping it will improve further.
“Do you expect deportations to decrease while ICE is in the airports and what are the tradeoffs of having ICE in the airports right now?” Reese asked.
“To address this obviously short-term problem and the chaos that has been sowed by these Democrats on Capitol Hill, to address the lines and to get Americans traveling and get them to where they need to be, so the president thinks this was a creative solution, that again, has been criticized, but we have seen wait times decrease. Not as much as we’d like, but hopefully they will continue to. But at major airports, over the course of the next few days as ICE is facilitating with travelers in these airports,” Leavitt said.
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Senate Democrats partially shut down DHS in February in response to the immigration enforcement-related killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. They demanded a list of immigration reforms in return for fully funding DHS, which included prohibiting ICE agents from racial profiling and wearing masks.
Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was the only member of his party to support the full-year appropriations bill for DHS. In response to Elon Musk’s offer to pay TSA agents’ salaries, Fetterman criticized his fellow Democrats for preventing TSA agents from getting paid.
Hundreds of TSA agents have quit their positions since the shutdown began and many have grown concerned about terror enforcement.
Despite ICE’s presence at the airports, passengers have reported waiting in lines for up to six hours, according to CBS News.
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