“You cannot improvise that. Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap,” he added. “It creates one.”
Instead of solving the problem of the 50,000-plus TSA employees who “have worked without pay for over five weeks,” Kelley said, “Washington’s answer isn’t to pay them. It’s to send ICE agents to do their jobs.”
The American Federation of Government Employees is the only union representing TSA officers.
Trump told reporters on Monday that ICE agents would also be able to conduct immigration checks and make arrests, though it was not the primary reason for their placement.
“They’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. That’s very fertile territory. But that’s not why they’re there. They’re really there to help,” he said.
TSA receives its funding from DHS, meaning its more than 50,000 frontline officers are not getting paid but are required to work as they are deemed “essential employees.” More than 400 TSA employees have quit and thousands more have called out of work, according to DHS.
Kelley asserted ICE agents should still not replace absent TSA employees, who “deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be,” he said.
DHS acting assistant secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement to Fortune that the department would not disclose where ICE agents were deployed for security reasons.
TSA officers’ call-out rates reached their highest level of the shutdown on Sunday, with 11.76% of workers, or more than 3,450 employees, not showing up to work, DHS data showed. That included about 40% of TSA officers from George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, according to DHS data.
“It’s inexcusable that our security agents, our frontline agents, that are essential to what we do, are not being paid, and it’s ridiculous to see them being used as political chips,” he said.
