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Trump Threatens to Flood US Airports With ICE as Senate GOP Blocks Dem Bill to Pay TSA
"Trump's paramilitary army of ICE agents does not belong in our airports and is not properly trained to do this work," said one Democratic congresswoman.
Mar 22, 2026
As Senate Republicans on Saturday voted against advancing a Democratic bill to pay Transportation Security Administration workers during talks over Department of Homeland Security funding, GOP President Donald Trump tried to pin the blame for the partial DHS shutdown on Democrats and threatened to flood US airports with immigration agents.
The conduct of immigration agents under DHS—which oversees Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement—in US communities, particularly Minnesota's Twin Cites, led to the partial shutdown last month, with Democrats demanding reforms after CBP and ICE agents killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
While CBP and ICE can use the extra money they got last year in Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, other DHS agencies are more impacted by the shutdown, including TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Secret Service, and the Coast Guard. Some essential government employees have been working without pay for over a month.
Congress' April recess is rapidly approaching. The largest federal workers union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), warned Friday that "on March 27, about 47,000 TSA officers, 22,000 FEMA employees, 8,900 Coast Guard civilian staff, and hundreds of Border Patrol administrative personnel will miss another paycheck."
AFGE national president Everett Kelley said that the House of Representatives and Senate "have had weeks to fix this, and they have barely been in the same building."
"Members of Congress have walked past our TSA members at airport security checkpoints more often than they've met to negotiate an end to this stalemate," he continued. "Those officers deserve to be paid for the work they do to keep those members safe. The least Congress can do for these patriotic American workers is act before legislators leave town for the weekend, or, worse, head off on a weeks-long recess."
The Senate did meet on Saturday, when Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) argued that "it is unacceptable, unacceptable to say we will only pay TSA workers if it is attached to a bill that funds ICE with no reforms. But that's what Republicans have done. Democrats want to pay TSA workers ASAP, no strings attached. A yes vote on my motion would start doing that."
The vote was 41-49, with every GOP senator present voting "no." In response, Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) declared that "Senate Republicans voted against paying TSA agents because they insist on tying TSA funding to their push to give even more money to ICE—without basic reforms."
"That is not how this should work—and it is just plain wrong that Republicans are preventing TSA agents from getting paid while airport lines grow longer across the country," she said. "We could fund TSA and other important parts of DHS today—while we press ahead with negotiations on ICE and Border Patrol—if Republicans stopped standing in the way."
Meanwhile, as Americans at various airports contend with long lines due to TSA workers quitting or calling out, Trump said on his Truth Social platform Saturday that "the Radical Left Democrats have hurt so many people with their vicious and uncaring ways. What they have done to the Department of Homeland Security, our fantastic TSA Officers, and, most importantly, the great people of our Country, is an absolute disgrace. If the Democrats do not allow for Just and Proper Security at our Airports, and elsewhere throughout our Country, ICE will do the job far better than ever done before!"
"The Fascist Democrats will never protect America, but the Republicans will," he added. "Just like the Radical Left allowed millions of Criminals to pour into our Country through their ridiculous and dangerous Open Border Policy, the Republicans closed it all down, and we now have the Strongest Border in American History. Likewise, I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, 'GET READY.' NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!"
Responding in a statement, Congresswoman Becca Balint (D-Vt.) said: "Republicans, we need you to speak up now. This is a national security nightmare. Democrats have been trying for weeks to get TSA funded. The votes to get that done have been there since before the shutdown began. ICE has continued to have access to a massive slush fund throughout this entire shutdown, which is why they're so readily available. Stop trying to tie additional funding for ICE to funding the rest of DHS."
"Trump's paramilitary army of ICE agents does not belong in our airports and is not properly trained to do this work," added Balint. "I ask my Republican colleagues: Stop submitting to the whims of this out-of-control president. You are risking national security by your silence and complicity. YOU can put an end to this. Say something. Fund TSA. For the sake of our country, show some damn courage!"
Apparently undeterred, Trump added Sunday that "on Monday, ICE will be going to airports to help our wonderful TSA Agents who have stayed on the job despite the fact that the Radical Left Democrats, who are only focused on protecting hard line criminals who have entered our Country illegally, are endangering the USA by holding back the money that was long ago agreed to with signed and sealed contracts, and all. But watch, no matter how great a job ICE does, the Lunatics leading the incompetent Dems will be highly critical of their work. THEY WILL DO A FANTASTIC JOB. The great Tom Homan is in charge!!!"
AFGE's Kelley said in a Sunday statement that "ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security. TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats specifically designed to evade detection at checkpoints—skills that require specialized instruction, hands-on practice, and ongoing recertification. You cannot improvise that. Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one."
"Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe. They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be," he added. "Congress has the power to fund TSA today. It's time for them to stop playing politics and do their jobs."
This article has been updated with additional comments from President Donald Trump and AFGE national president Everett Kelley.
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Vets in Labor Are Standing Up to Trump
Veterans in the labor movement have played a frontline role resisting Trump administration attempts to cut government jobs and services and strip federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.
Jan 24, 2026
The US is home to 17 million military veterans. About 1.3 million of them currently work in union jobs, with women and people of color making up the fastest-growing cohorts. Veterans are more likely to join a union than non-veterans, according to the AFL-CIO. In half a dozen states, 25% or more of all actively employed veterans belong to unions.
In the heyday of industrial unionism in the decades following World War II, hundreds of thousands of former soldiers could be found on the front lines of labor struggles in auto, steel, meatpacking, electrical equipment manufacturing, mining, trucking, and the telephone industry. Many World War II vets became militant stewards, local union officers, and, in some cases, well-known union reformers in the United Mine Workers and Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers.
The late labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey argued that the post-war union movement better understood the “strategic value” of veterans than organized labor does today. In her own advice to unions about contract campaign planning, she recommended enlisting former service members whose past “experience with discipline, military formation, and overcoming fear and adversity” could be employed on picket lines and strike committees.
In addition, the high social standing of military veterans in many blue-collar communities can be a valuable PR asset when “bargaining for the public good” or trying to general greater public support for any legislative or political campaign.
A D-Day Rally In DC
The wisdom of that advice has been confirmed repeatedly by the front-line role that veterans in the labor movement have played in resisting Trump administration attempts to cut government jobs and services and strip federal workers of their collective bargaining rights. At agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), more than 100,000 former service members have been adversely affected by these right-wing Republican attacks.
In response, the AFL-CIO’s Union Veterans Council brought thousands of protestors to a June 6 rally on the Mall in Washington, DC, where they heard speakers including now retired United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts, a Vietnam veteran.
"We served our country, and now they’re breaking their promise to take care of us. We can’t accept that.”
With local turnout help from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Nurses United, and the Federal Unionist Network (FUN), other anti-Trump activists participated in 225 simultaneous actions around the country, including in red states like Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, and Kentucky. Some “watch parties,” organized for real-time viewing of the DC event, were held in local union halls to highlight the labor-vet overlap.
James Jones, a FUN member and Gulf War veteran from Boone, North Carolina, traveled all the way to DC on the 81st anniversary of D-Day because he wanted Congress to understand the importance of VA services to veterans like himself.
Jones now works for the National Park Service and belongs to AFGE. He’s urging all his friends who are vets, fellow VA patients, and federal workers to start “going to rallies, and join these groups that are really fighting back. The government needs to keep the promise it made to veterans. We served our country, and now they’re breaking their promise to take care of us. We can’t accept that.”
VA Not for Sale
Private-sector union activists have also been rallying their fellow veterans, inside and outside the labor movement.
Communications Workers Local 6215 Executive vice-president David Marshall, a former Marine, has joined rank-and-file lobbying in Washington, DC against Trump’s cuts in VA staffing and services, calling them “a betrayal of a promise to care for us.”
Marshall is a member of Common Defense, the progressive veterans’ group. Common Defense’s “VA Not for Sale” campaign is fighting the privatization of veterans’ healthcare, which many fear will destroy what Marshall calls the “sense of community and solidarity” that VA patients experience when they get in-house treatment, as opposed to the costly and less effective out-sourced care favored by President Trump. “Regular hospitals don’t understand PTSD or anything else about conditions specifically related to military service,” he says.
An AT&T technician in Dallas, Marshall was also a fiery and effective speaker at that city’s big “No Kings Day” rally last June, when he explained why he and other veterans in labor are opposing MAGA extremism, political and state violence, and related threats to democracy.
“We’ve seen peaceful protestors met with riot gear, and we’ve heard the threats to deploy active-duty Marines against American citizens,” he told a crowd of 10,000. “Let me be clear: Using the military to silence dissent is not strength; it’s tyranny. And no one knows that better than those who have worn the uniform.”
Veterans for Social Change
Marshall is a third-generation union member born and raised in southern West Virginia. His father and grandfather were coal miners; his grandmother Molly Marshall was active in the Black Lung Association that helped propel disabled World War II veteran Arnold Miller into the presidency of the UMW in 1972. During his own 25-year career as a CWA member, Marshall has served on his union’s safety committee, as a delegate to the national convention, and now as an officer of his local.
Marshall belongs to CWA’s Minority Caucus, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and the NAACP. Along with Britni Cuington, a Local 6215 steward and Air Force vet, he attended a founding meeting of Common Defense’s Black Veterans Caucus at the Highlander Center in Tennessee.
“We have to stay in lock-step with them and show everyone following the Constitution that we have their back.”
Both Marshall and Cuington have since lobbied against the redistricting scheme concocted by Texas Republicans to secure more House seats in the 2026 midterm elections. Testifying at a public hearing on behalf of the Texas AFL-CIO, Cuington pointed out that “minority veterans already face barriers to access to the services, benefits, and economic opportunities we have earned.” She condemned the state’s new districts as racial gerrymandering in disguise that will disenfranchise “veteran heavy, working class neighborhoods.”
In his role as a CWA organizer, Marshall has signed up 30 Common Defense field organizers around the country—almost all fellow vets—as new members of his local. He’s now helping them negotiate their first staff union contract. In addition, Marshall encourages former service members in other bargaining units to participate in the union’s Veterans for Social Change program, which has done joint Veterans Organizing Institute training with CWA.
One fellow leader of that network is Keturah Johnson, a speaker at the 2024 Labor Notes conference. After her military service, she got a job at Piedmont Airlines in 2013 as a ramp agent, and then became a flight attendant. A decade later, she became the first queer woman of color and combat veteran to serve as international vice president of the 50,000-member Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.
A National Guard Casualty
One CWA member, 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, a Frontier lineman in Martinsburg, West Virginia, was seriously wounded in late November after being sent as part of the National Guard deployment to Washington, DC. A fellow Guard member was killed. (Their assailant was a mentally ill, CIA-trained former death squad member from Afghanistan, relocated to the US after the collapse of the US-backed government there in 2021.)
According to Marshall, “it’s shameful that they were ever put in that position”—by a Republican governor going along with Trump’s federalization of guard units for domestic policing purposes. “It’s all political theater,” he says. “They were just props, just standing around, with no real mission.”
Along with Common Defense, Marshall praises the six fellow veterans in Congress whose recent video statement reminding active duty service members of their “duty not to follow illegal orders” led President Trump to call them “traitors” guilty of “seditious behavior, punishable by death.”
“We have to stay in lock-step with them and show everyone following the Constitution that we have their back,” Marshall says.
This piece was first published by Labor Notes.
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'A Serious Violation': FBI Searches Home of Washington Post Journalist for Classified Documents
"This is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press," said one First Amendment advocate.
Jan 14, 2026
A press freedom group on Wednesday accused the Trump administration of a "disturbing escalation" in its "war on the First Amendment" after the FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who has extensively covered President Donald Trump's attempts to gut the federal workforce.
FBI agents reportedly conducted a search early Wednesday morning at the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an investigation into a federal contractor who is accused of illegally retaining classified documents.
"If true, this would be a serious violation of press freedom," said the Freedom of the Press Foundation in a social media post.
The Post reported that the agents seized Natanson's cellphone, Garmin watch, a personal laptop, and a laptop issued by the newspaper.
The warrant stated that the FBI was investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator with top secret security clearance who has been accused of taking classified intelligence reports to his home in Maryland. The documents were found in his lunch box and basement, an FBI affidavit said.
Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney noted that the criminal complaint regarding Perez-Lugones' case does not mention allegations that he gave any classified documents to a reporter.
"The FBI's search and seizure of a journalist's personal and professional devices appears to be a serious violation of press freedom and underscores why we need to enact greater federal protections for both journalists and their sources," said Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America. "Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the seizure is linked to an investigation into a federal contractor who is alleged to have leaked classified information. It's worth reiterating, though we shouldn't have to, that journalists have a constitutionally protected right to publish government secrets. We call for the FBI to immediately return Hannah Natanson's devices."
Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told the New York Times that the FBI search at Natanson's home was "intensely concerning" and could chill "legitimate journalistic activity."
“There are important limits on the government’s authority to carry out searches that implicate First Amendment activity,” Jaffer said.
As the Committee to Protect Journalists notes in a guide to reporters' legal rights, the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 established high standards for searches and seizures of journalists' materials that are "reasonably believed to be related to media intended for dissemination to the public—including 'work product materials' (e.g., notes or voice memos containing mental impressions, conclusions, opinions, etc. of the person who prepared such materials) and 'documentary materials' (e.g., video tapes, audio tapes, photographs, and anything else physically documenting an event)."
"These materials generally cannot be searched or seized unless they are reasonably believed to relate to a crime committed by the person possessing the materials," reads the guide. "They may, however, be held for custodial storage incident to an arrest of the journalist possessing the materials, so long as the material is not searched and is returned to the arrestee intact."
Last year, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) ended a Biden-era policy that limited its ability to search or subpoena a reporter's data as part of investigations into leaks.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the DOJ "will not tolerate unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump’s policies, victimize government agencies, and cause harm to the American people.”
Before becoming FBI director, Kash Patel said in 2023 that should Trump return to the White House, his administration would "come after people in the media" in efforts to target the president's enemies.
The Post reported Wednesday that "while it is not unusual for FBI agents to conduct leak investigations around reporters who publish sensitive government information, it is highly unusual and aggressive for law enforcement to conduct a search on a reporter’s home."
Natanson has spent much of Trump's second term thus far covering his efforts to fire federal employees, tens of thousands of whom have been dismissed as the president seeks to ensure the entire government workforce is pushing forward his right-wing agenda.
She wrote an essay last month for the Post in which she described being inundated with messages over the past year from more than 1,000 federal employees who wanted to tell her "how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues, or transforming their agency’s missions." She has written about the toll the mass firings have had on workers' mental health.
Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement that "physical searches of reporters’ devices, homes, and belongings are some of the most invasive investigative steps law enforcement can take."
"There are specific federal laws and policies at the Department of Justice that are meant to limit searches to the most extreme cases because they endanger confidential sources far beyond just one investigation and impair public interest reporting in general," said Brown. "While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public, this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”
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