Nick Miroff

Well, my first thought was this isn't going to help.

Second was that this is consistent with the way the president views ICE as a, you know, more than like a personal army, kind of like a personal errand corps, where if he needs like some kind of, you know, job done and he wants the optics of toughness, he just calls on ICE, which, you know, once again is just a gross misunderstanding of what that law enforcement agency's role is.

And so...

Over the course of last weekend, you know, 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 going to be.

And then you kind of saw it take shape over the course of the weekend with the border czar Tom Homan going on the Sunday shows and seemingly doing a kind of damage control, like, oh, we're going to have them watching the exits and supporting TSA, right?

which was an acknowledgement that they are not trained to do the core functions of TSA, which are the things that obviously slow the lines down.

We're simply there to help TSA do their job in areas that don't need their specialized expertise, such as, you know, screening through the x-ray machine.

Not training that?

We won't do that.

All week, what we've seen is imagery of ICE officers mostly standing around.

And ironically, it's kind of a nice PR opportunity for an agency that has obviously been widely vilified over the past year for its role in places like Minneapolis.

They are in the airports without masks.

They're handing out water bottles.

They're smiling.

And of course, they're getting some of the favorable coverage from people saying, oh, wow, they're actually really nice people.

You know, a lot of people have rightly commented that ICE officers in the airports remind them of the role that the National Guard is playing on the streets of Washington, D.C., because they just see National Guard troops kind of standing around and not really doing anything.

You know, 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.

You know, 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, you know, personal federal force that is at the beck and call of the president.