Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Jess.
And Ryan. Tickets for our live show in Los Angeles are on sale now.
Join us Tuesday, April 28th at the El Rey Theater at 8 p.m. There'll be special guests, conversations about the business of Hollywood, and afterwards, we'll stick around to meet you all.
Find a link in our show notes to get your tickets before they sell out, which they did very quickly last time. See you there! Waiting in the security line at the airport is never fun. But right now, it's really not fun. Because the lines these days are out of control.
At Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, one of the busiest airports in the country, the TSA line stretches so far back, you can't even see where it starts.
This is actually still the TSA pre-check line. This line now wraps outside. So if you think about it, it wraps around the inside four different times.
In Houston, the security line doesn't just stretch. It descends. It curves past the departure zone, downstairs through baggage claim, and spills out onto yet another floor.
Stay at home. If you live in Houston and you have a flight today and it is not mandatory and it is leisure, do not come here. I'm literally on my way back home. I've turned around.
The lines are bad pretty much everywhere.
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Chapter 2: What are the current challenges at TSA checkpoints in airports?
Over the weekend, Trump announced on Truth Social that ICE was going to take over and help with airport security.
ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency carrying out President Trump's mass deportation agenda. How unusual is it for ICE to step in at airports like this?
It's pretty unprecedented. I mean, obviously, we've been in this situation before where there have been government shutdowns and TSA has gone unpaid. But it's the first time that a president has thought, let's send in our immigration guys.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Wednesday, March 25th. Coming up on the show, how deportation officers ended up staffing America's airports. The Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, was founded after 9-11 to centralize airport security under one agency, instead of leaving it up to the airlines or private contractors.
It was meant to make airports safer, but the change also made airport security more vulnerable to political infighting. Now, every time there's a government shutdown, the TSA is affected.
There was a near-total government shutdown just a few months ago, and TSA was obviously a victim of that, too.
The last shutdown lasted 43 days and ended in November. Then, in January, after ICE officers killed two American citizens in Minneapolis, Democrats used a different budget deadline to pick another fight over government funding, this time specifically related to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS oversees ICE.
Democrats really stood their ground and said, we are not funding the Department of Homeland Security unless this administration agrees to some limits on ISIS powers, some sort of guardrails on how they're allowed to operate.
And so what is it specifically that Democrats are demanding?
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Chapter 3: Why are TSA agents walking off the job during the government shutdown?
If the TSA—DHS is not being funded. The TSA is part of DHS, but ICE is also part of DHS. So how is it that ICE has funding to do this work? Yeah.
Yeah, it's a good question. So over the summer, Republicans passed this bill. It's called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Right. This is Trump's big piece of landmark legislation that he passed last year.
Exactly. Exactly. And in that bill, Republicans gave DHS $170 billion basically to carry out the mass deportation. A huge amount of that money was allotted to ICE. And specifically, it doesn't run on sort of the annual funding cycle the way normal funding does. It's like this money that ICE has that expires in 2029, and they can use it whenever.
And so basically, ICE has been able to continue paying all of its officers, even though their normal funding is shut down.
So how did the Department of Homeland Security receive this decision by the president? What did they think of it?
First of all, we were told that they were taken completely by surprise. They learned the same moment that we all saw Trump's post on Truth Social. You know, I reached out to people at ICE over the weekend and they were like a mix of panicked, incredulous, confused, definitely unhappy about the position they've been put in. Why? I think it's a few things.
I think, first of all, ICE is an agency with a mission, and that is to arrest and deport immigrants in the country illegally. And people who work at ICE believe in that mission. And particularly now, they believe in this idea that they're supposed to be carrying out a mass deportation for Trump. Suddenly, Trump is taking a lot of agents off their normal jobs and having them do airport security.
I mean, that was like really, really frustrating for people. And not to mention, ICE agents don't have any training in airport security, right? They're trained to, like, arrest immigrants. They're trained in immigration law.
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Chapter 4: How did ICE become involved in airport security operations?
And rather than run actual security, they're doing more crowd control, like monitoring exits and guiding people to the right lines. Trump border official Tom Homan said this frees up tasks so that the remaining TSA agents can do the actual screening work that they're trained for. What has the DHS said about how much of an impact this is having on these long lines?
Not much, as far as I can tell. They're definitely, you know, defending the president's decision to send ICE and saying that it's making America safer, but no signs yet that it has drastically improved the situation.
During a press briefing today, a White House spokesperson said wait times at TSA lines have gone down. But how long could it take to get TSA back up and running? That's next. The situation at airports and the decision to send in ICE officers is putting pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to reach a deal. President Trump recently suggested that the whole thing was giving him an advantage.
When I announced yesterday about ICE, the Democrats called, we want to settle, we want to settle. And I told the people, don't settle, don't settle.
It's interesting, right? I mean, that was his framing of it. And certainly there were some Democrats who were pretty unhappy about the fact that ICE was being sent to airports because they just find the tactics of ICE so unacceptable.
Democrats, meanwhile, say it gives them the leverage.
To other Democrats, it actually kind of signaled that Trump was realizing what a political crunch these TSA lines were creating for him. And so in some ways, I think the Democrats think it brought him to the table rather than vice versa.
This is Donald Trump yet again falling back to what is his only play, which is to double down, to dig in.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of deploying ICE at airports?
— That's Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman. — Why doesn't he take the deal that John Thune had reached, that is on the House floor right now, to fund TSA?
— Either way, now that both sides are at the table, there's been some movement on Capitol Hill. Over the weekend, Republican Senator John Thune met with Trump and proposed a solution. The idea was to fund all of DHS, but to leave ICE funding specifically to a process called reconciliation, which is basically a way to fund certain things with a simple majority in the Senate.
So how did Trump respond to this deal about funding all of DHS except for ICE?
He rejected it at first and pretty publicly. He, you know, he told Republicans don't negotiate with Democrats. He also said, I'm not signing this unless it also passes with the Save America Act.
Only settle if you get the Save America Act.
The Save America Act is Trump's top legislative priority right now. It's a bill about voter eligibility. Among other things, it would require people to prove citizenship before registering to vote and show government-issued ID at the ballot box. Tell me more about that. Is that likely to happen? Could this actually help get the SAVE Act passed?
I would say the mood on the Hill yesterday was like people almost laughing that Trump had said that because everyone knew that that was impossible.
Hmm. Why is it impossible?
Democrats are pretty uniformly against the SAVE Act, and Republicans are not uniformly for it. And you know the way the Senate math works is that they need 60 votes to pass legislation. They barely even have 50 votes right now.
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