Trump's "Paper Clip" Fix: ICE Agents Standing Around Airports Doing Nothing

TSA workers are unpaid and understaffed. Trump's solution? Send immigration agents to watch.

Cliff’s Note: ICE is standing around airports. We’re stuck in 4-hr lines. Trump killed a bipartisan fix to pay TSA workers.

Called sending ICE in: “the invention of the paper clip.”

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— Cliff

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By David Shuster

If there is any Trump government run spectacle more absurd than long, shuffling lines of citizens surrendering their belts, phones, and carry-ons to a rubber bin, it is the ignorant and simplistic belief that such a security spectacle can be improved by the addition of ICE agents.

And thus, we have Donald Trump’s latest rotting brainstorm: Trump has now deployed ICE agents to airports to somehow shorten the monstrous queues at TSA checkpoints.

Trump said it was his idea and was as simple and yet important as “the invention of the paper clip.” Seriously. He said that.

Trump’s “paper clip” is so poorly and ridiculously conceived that one is tempted to admire it as a work of grotesque art. The problem, plainly stated, is a shortage of trained security personnel. The remedy is not to import federal agents whose training lies elsewhere entirely and place them loitering in terminals like decorative office plants.

The mind reels.

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Airport security is not a matter of posture. It requires specific training, coordination, and experience, things ICE agents, by design, don’t have.

Even the largest federal workers’ union has warned that using “untrained, armed” personnel in place of TSA officers could actually make things worse.

So what exactly are taxpayers getting here?

At best, a very expensive illusion of action. At worst, a misallocation of federal resources during a crisis created by the Trump administration itself.

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Trump refuses to agree with a Republican and Democratic Senate compromise stemming from thorny issues involving ICE masks and warrantless raids. The bipartisan agreement is essentially to punt on the ICE issues (with votes on ICE separately in the weeks ahead) and immediately pass a stand alone bill funding TSA and giving TSA agents the back pay they are owed. Trump, ever the toddler, said “no” and keeps demanding all of DHS be funded at once with no ICE restrictions ever.

So, TSA remains understaffed because TSA workers remain unpaid.

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Fewer and fewer TSA agents are showing up to work; lines are getting longer; and travel nightmares include waiting in a TSA security line for longer than 4 hours in Atlanta and Houston. Several other airports have security lines stretching 3 hours. Fun times.

Adding insult to the misery, ICE agents are simply standing around watching the security line madness.

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It is the Trump administration bureaucratic equivalent of prescribing a new hat for a person with a broken leg.

There is, however, a remarkable irony lurking beneath the absurdity, and it is too rich to ignore. Thanks to endless examples of ICE agents opening fire with tear gas and real bullets when confronted by anti-ICE activists and citizen observers, ICE has acquired a certain reputation.

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As the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis underscored, ICE is associated with the violent, sociopathic, disregard of constitutional rights.

So, maybe having ICE agents stand around idly in airports is the least harmful use of their time. In other words, it is better to have them misdirect a family than shoot an ICE protester in the face.

This is not, of course, a serious defense of the airport deployment. It is merely an acknowledgment that whenever the Trump administration gets confused (most days of the week) its follies begin to compete with one another for the title of “least objectionable.” The fact we’ve been reduced to such a calculation is itself an indictment of the Trump era.

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Here is the bottom line. If the goal is to shorten TSA airport lines, the answer is clear: Trump should support and sign the bipartisan compromise, pay TSA workers, restore staffing levels, and treat airport security like the specialized job it is. Anything else, including an ICE deployment, is just theater.

And Trump theater, no matter how dramatic, is not getting anyone through security to their flight faster.

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