Chapter 1: What has led to the recent airport security delays?
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Daily producer Diana Nguyen here. It's 9 in the morning. I am at Terminal E at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. There's a line snaking out the door to get through security. And we are going to go and talk to some of these people. How are you feeling right now?
I was very stressed the last couple of days.
On Monday, I was in security for five and a half hours, getting literally to this very point where I was now, and then I missed my flight. I was here on Monday. I came on Tuesday and turned around, so this is my third day trying to make it home.
Oh my gosh.
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
My flight's at 2.45. So you're giving yourself five, six, yeah. Five hours.
On Wednesday, the misery that millions of travelers have endured over the past week became official.
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Chapter 2: How are travelers affected by the TSA workforce shortage?
So the union that represents TSA workers will push back hard against any sort of suggestion that these are like organized political statement sort of call-outs where people are calling in their absences. And say instead that, you know, this is just reflecting the reality of what everybody who's working in those particular areas that have seen the longest security lines is having to go through.
Which is why you've seen in places like Houston, the number of call-outs on certain days go up above 40%. And then that is going to translate directly into pain for the airline traveler, right? Same sort of thing at JFK. You've seen call-out numbers consistently go above 30%. That's a long, long line.
You had mentioned this. President Trump decides to bring ICE agents in as a solution to the shortages of TSA workers calling out. Help us understand that logic and whether it's been working.
So the logic, ostensibly, is need more bodies, have more bodies. So send them to help out the TSA. The problem is that not everybody believes that's the actual reason. There's a lot of suspicion that actually they are there to try to augment their ability to do apprehensions and deportations.
And the president did say they were still going to be performing that role when they were deployed to airports. And then the TSA, at least the, you know, reps in the union, they really don't like it because they are basically saying, look, these guys were not trained to do what we do. The public does not feel comfortable around an ICE official.
The TSA is actually supposed to make you feel comfortable when they're doing your security screenings at the same time. And because they weren't trained to do it, they can't actually help out in most of these security lines at all.
So they stand there passing out water, looking like they're trying to be engaged, but not actually, you know, combing through your bags or getting people through those metal detectors.
Interesting.
And so what help were they giving? And for the TSA, it feels like, you know, added insult upon injury because ICE officials are getting paid because there was this pot of cash. tens of billions of extra money in last year's domestic policy bill that has been used to pay ICE officials, and the TSA workers are not being paid and still having to then do the work.
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Chapter 3: What role does the government shutdown play in airport chaos?
480 TSA workers leaving could turn into a lot more than that. And the number of people calling out could reach astronomical percentages of the folks at various airports.
So the number to pay attention to is really the call-outs number. If that keeps increasing higher than, you know, the 40% level, 50% level at some of these airports, or if you start to see numbers like that at many, many more airports across the country, we are going to see how much stress this fragile system can actually take.
There have already been warnings by top Trump administration officials that, you know, smaller airports could have to close if things get much worse. And certainly there's always the option that those lines can get even longer. How deep and how far we get into that potential system breakdown, though, really depends on whether Congress can come to an agreement sooner rather than later.
O'Karn, thank you very much. We appreciate it.
Thank you.
After the break, congressional correspondent Michael Gold on whether or not it looks like Congress can come to an agreement to end this crisis. We'll be right back.
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Chapter 4: How are TSA workers coping with unpaid wages during the shutdown?
We should say that that's a pretty big concession to Democrats.
Yeah.
It's a huge concession to Democrats because Democrats have said from the get-go that they did not want to pass a bill that funds ICE. I mean, this was like their main point. They didn't want to fund ICE without these new restrictions on federal agents, and Republicans are coming out and saying, okay, we will pass a bill that does that.
We'll fund everything except the parts of this department that you don't want to fund. Potential breakthrough. It is a potential breakthrough. So they bring that deal to the White House, that proposal, and it gets to President Trump, and he... completely rejects it. The president says, I don't want to make a deal that doesn't fund ICE.
And he goes a step further and says, I don't want any deal that you guys pass unless you also take up this separate bill, the Save America Act, which puts restrictions on voting and requires voter ID.
Right, which you were on the show talking about, I think, a week or so ago, and which has, we should say, nothing to do with the DHS shutdown or TSA lines or ICE.
Right, that's correct. And if you were listening last week, you would know that the Senate has been basically debating this for a while, and this has been their main focus, but they've also been trying to get this deal done. And this is the first time that the president has come out and linked these two objectives together. Huh. So that brings us to Monday morning, and negotiations are frozen.
And that is when Trump decides to send ICE agents to the airports to help out the TSA, relieve the long lines, try and relieve the officers of all this work they're doing. And Democrats are a bit confused because to them, they now see Trump reminding everybody that this crisis at the airports was all about ICE to begin with. Right.
And then there's one other thing that I think is really important. John Thune, the Senate majority leader, has said to the senators, hey, I know you guys thought that you would be leaving on Friday for a two-week recess. If we can't get a deal done to get us out of this crisis, you might have to stay here until we do. Mmm. And senators are just like us.
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Chapter 5: What solutions have been proposed to address the security line crisis?
They must no longer wear masks. They must identify themselves. And It doesn't seem like the Republican plan to fund everything in DHS, but ICE would really delineate any of those reforms. So it would ask Democrats to kind of give up the entire purpose of this agency shutdown and the leverage that they have to ever get these reforms.
Yes. The argument that Democrats made when they saw that Republican offer is that it did not do anything they'd asked for. And that if they agreed to it, they would, on the one hand, not be voting to fund ICE, which is very important to them. But on the other hand, they wouldn't have gotten anything out of this back-and-forth negotiation.
And there is a concern, mostly expressed privately, that if you fund the TSA and the Coast Guard and all these other agencies, Republicans will never have any incentive to agree to any of these reforms on ICE. Because... There won't be any reason for them to do it.
because the Republicans, as you might remember, last year gave ICE billions of dollars in their big, beautiful bill that ICE is using to continue doing what it's been doing anyway. Right.
Karin mentioned that ICE is reasonably well-funded from that domestic spending bill as it is.
ICE has a lot of big, beautiful money, and that's why they've been able to keep operating. And so Democrats are worried that if they agree to this deal, they're not getting anything, and that they've spent the last five or six weeks holding up TSA and accomplished nothing.
But on the other hand, Michael, and I'm curious what you would say to this and what Democrats in Congress would say to this, a case can be made that in the period since the Department of Homeland Security shutdown started, a lot has changed inside DHS and inside ICE. Tom Homan, who you just mentioned, he drew down a lot of the agents from Minneapolis.
And the overall intensity of street enforcement around the country by ICE agents has really abated. And we saw the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who was really the face of ICE's most aggressive tactics, got ousted. And her replacement... Mark Wayne Mullen seems more open to reforms, at least according to what he said in his confirmation hearings.
So you could argue, and I wonder if some Democrats do, that the shutdown did do a fair bit of what Democrats wanted. overall want to see in the direction of immigration enforcement?
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