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Rights Groups, Dems Warn of Disaster as Trump Sends ICE Agents to US Airports
“ICE and other federal agents have already shown the cost to us all when the president deploys them on his whim to act as a domestic policing force.”
Mar 23, 2026
Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties advocates are warning that President Donald Trump’s decision to send US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to airports across the country could have disastrous consequences, particularly given the agency’s deadly conduct on the ground in American cities in recent months.
Trump announced on Sunday that he would be sending ICE agents to airports to assist in security operations, as many Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers have been either quitting or calling out amid a partial US government shutdown that has left them to work without pay.
Naureen Shah, director of policy and government affairs for immigration at the ACLU, expressed significant concerns about sending ICE to airpots, and she said it could further harm Americans' civil liberties.
"Never in our history has a president deployed armed agents to the airport to inspire fear among families," said Shah. "The American people don’t want to live in White House advisor Stephen Miller’s dystopian police state. ICE and other federal agents have already shown the cost to us all when the president deploys them on his whim to act as a domestic policing force."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) also warned of potentially disastrous consequences from having ICE conduct airport security.
"ICE agents at airports will only aggravate delays and lines—disrupting checks, interrogating travelers, dragging parents from children, detaining citizens, brutalizing families, shooting, and even killing," he wrote. "Brutal, lawless tactics common in communities across the country by masked, unidentified agents, violating basic rights—no way to help TSA or travelers."
While Democratic lawmakers publicly condemn the move, journalist Rachel Bade reported on Monday that some Democrats believe that the optics deploying ICE agents at US airports will be terrible for the White House and will simply add to the chaos and turmoil experienced by American fliers.
"Great—do it!” one senior Democratic official told Bade. “Let’s fuck around and find out.”
A second Democratic source predicted to Bade that "armed agents at airports will crush tourism and freak people out," while a third sarcastically requested that the president send fully masked ICE agents to handle airport security.
Bade added that Democrats see the decision to send ICE agents to airports as a panic move by a White House that wants to try anything to get videos of long airport check-in lines out of the news.
Because of this, Bade said, they feel "emboldened" to further squeeze Republicans on making reforms to ICE.
"Democrats say the move shows they’re winning," wrote Bade. "In past shutdowns, presidents have tried to ramp up the pain during closures, thus putting pressure on the opposition party causing the shutdown. Here, Trump has done the exact opposite, seeking a workaround to alleviate concerns."
Democratic lawmakers aren't the only ones predicting Trump's ICE gambit will blow up in his face.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told NPR on Sunday that it was likely that ICE agents would make the situations at airports even worse.
"ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security," said Kelley, who added that TSA workers "deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, also welcomed the move to deploy ICE to airports, as he said it would leave fewer masked agents roaming the streets to round up immigrant families.
"To me, this does a lot more to slow down ICE than anything," he wrote in a social media post. "I'll take that deal."
Although Trump has tried to pin blame for chaos at US airports solely on Democrats, Punchbowl News reported that the president on Sunday shot down a proposal from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to fund all of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) except for ICE, a move that would at least get TSA agents paid and end chaos at airports.
"Trump said no, according to multiple sources," wrote Punchbowl News. "The president wants Republicans to stay in DC and keep fighting with Democrats over DHS funding and the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s voter ID and proof-of-citizenship bill. Not only that, Trump warned that he’d publicly slam Senate Republicans if they left town for the upcoming recess."
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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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'A Non-Starter': Critics Slam Amtrak Request for DHS Watchlist Screening of Passengers
One digital rights advocate called the expanded surveillance a "terrifying" development that could lead to people "facing some really negative outcomes."
Apr 06, 2022
Civil liberties defenders sounded the alarm Wednesday after Amtrak asked the Transportation Safety Administration to start screening passengers against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's federal master terrorism watchlist.
"From our decades of work on the watchlisting system, we know it's a due process nightmare and prone to error."
Hearst Television reports the train service's request is part of the Amtrak Rail Passenger Threat Assessment, by which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reviews a targeted individual's "personally identifiable information" against the federal Terrorist Screening Database, commonly called the watchlist.
Personally identifiable information includes but is not limited to Social Security, Alien Registration, and driver's license numbers; financial or medical documents; biometrics; and criminal records. DHS may also collect and review targeted travelers' publicly available social media information.
"This request raises significant civil liberties and rights concerns," ACLU National Security Project director Hina Shamsi said in a statement. "From our decades of work on the watchlisting system, we know it's a due process nightmare and prone to error."
"The standards the government uses to place people on its massive master watchlist are vague, overbroad, and based on secret evidence," she added. "People on the watchlist are disproportionately people of color or immigrants, and can be wrongly stigmatized as terrorism suspects with no notice of their placement on the list or a meaningful opportunity to challenge it. Amtrak's request should be a non-starter and it needs to reverse course."
In an interview with Hearst Television, Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the expanded watchlist surveillance a "terrifying" development that could lead to people "facing some really negative outcomes when it comes to a contact with law enforcement should they be stopped for, you know, for like a broken tail light or something like that."
ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley said that "it's a classic example of mission creep."
"Pretty soon we're going to have people walking through, you know, body scanners to go to a Little League game," he told Hearst Television. "We don't want to turn America into an airport."
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Are Mass Plane Travel and Mass Tourism Unsustainable?
The coronavirus pandemic is just a symptom of systemic problems the industries cannot resolve.
Mar 26, 2020
"Ah, for the days when flying was a gentleman's pursuit! - before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and 'jet off' to Raleigh-Durham." --Robert ("Sideshow Bob") Terwillinger, The Simpsons, "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming."
In recent weeks, the coronavirus pandemic's devastating effect on the airline and tourist industries has been graphically evident. Airlines cutting flights by 50 percent or more while hurtling towards bankruptcy; passengers in chaotic airport scenes as they try to get home before travel bans; Venice, Paris, Rome-- for once-- resembling ghost towns; leviathan cruise ships forlorn and empty, like Wagner's Flying Dutchman.
This might not be a temporary bump in the road for these industries, but a precursor to their long-term viability if they do not radically change their business models. Observers have for many years questioned the environmental sustainability of both industries. What's more, airline travel has become so onerous for passengers that a consumer rebellion could be brewing even without fears of infectious disease.
Tourism has long been cursed with an inherent paradox that recent events have thrown into sharp perspective. Since about 1980, airline travel has gradually ceased to be an adventure (in the positive sense), and come to resemble the Stations of the Cross. From nonexistent cabin service, to checked bag fees (causing the need to shoehorn everything into the overhead, forcing delays both entering and exiting the plane), to intricately tiered fees imposing a rigid class system (like the accommodations on the Titanic), to shrinking, jammed-in seats making the airliner resemble a winged sardine can, the lot of the traveler is not a happy one.
And all of that is simply what happens on the plane. Since 9/11, airports have come to resemble mini-Soviet Unions, with every passenger under quasi-military discipline (including the requirement to "hurry up and wait," familiar to every GI). There are subtle indignities like removing belt and shoes, and what has been described as "security theater" (it is in practical terms all-but impossible to take inert liquids into an aircraft restroom and mix them into an explosive, given the need for a pressure vessel and freezing temperatures, but maybe the vast wastage of water bottles is economic stimulus for the concessionaires' $2 water on the other side of the checkpoint).
Is all this flying really necessary? Perhaps the current virus outbreak will teach businesses sending their employees hither and yon that all the fancy teleconferencing gear they've bought is actually usable. And possibly the reason business travel has heretofore not been perceived as a burden is because it can be expensed. That may change as the health, as well as environmental, costs of plane travel become more pressing.
Under a distance of about 400 miles, airline travel for any purpose makes no sense, either environmentally or in terms of convenience. But Americans, seemingly alone among developed nations, are shackled to airlines if they don't want to go by automobile. High speed trains would solve the problem, but there is no will to build them, given higher priorities like multi-trillion-dollar stalemates in the Middle East and tax cuts for billionaires.
The entire tourism industry faces dilemmas on a similar scale. The paradox of tourism has been around for centuries. Samuel Johnson, the sage of 18th century London, was asked about his trip to visit the Giant's Causeway in Ireland: was it worth seeing? "Oh, it was worth seeing, he replied. "It just wasn't worth going to see."
I was reminded of Johnson's witticism a couple of months ago when I was inveigled to go to Thailand. "Sure," I thought. "Why not?" But interminably long flights across the International Date Line jet lagged me into uselessness for a few days in each direction. And although it occurred significantly before coronavirus peaked in East Asia, a subliminal but nagging fear of contamination accompanied every flight. And that was only the travel portion.
Thailand, slightly larger than California but with 30 million more people, is already a densely populated nation. At best a middle-income country, it simply cannot handle millions of foreign tourists. Resort regions like Phuket are vastly over-touristed and overbuilt with perpetually jammed roads, and showing signs of chronic pollution. And this was after the Christmas peak of European tourism and in the midst of local complaints that tourism was down because of the then-local virus problem in Wuhan.
Bangkok is now a polluted, overgrown Soylent Green stand-in, its city proper more heavily populated than New York. There might be more motor vehicles per capita there than in a comparably-sized U.S. city, with two-stroke motorcycles and tuk-tuks spewing out massive amounts of pollution in addition to noise that would wake the dead. (A single afternoon's use of one two-stroke leaf blower emits more pollution than a V-8 Ford F-150 Raptor driven cost-to-coast; keep that in mind when contemplating that the GOP dearly wants to abolish the EPA).
These phenomena are of course not limited to Thailand. All over the Third World, scenic places have become colonized by a metastasizing, lopsided overdevelopment due to mass tourism, one that not only ruins the point of going there in the first place, but also makes the local people dependent on an economic monoculture as pernicious in its own way to their unique cultures as the Central American banana plantations.
As for the developed world, once our current crisis is over, you'd better forget about contemplating the timeless beauty of the Venus de Milo at the Louvre, or retracing the steps of Thomas Mann's characters in a misty, twilit Venice. The Louvre is as crowded as Times Square on New Year's Eve, while a seven-story tall cruise liner dropping anchor rather spoils the view to the other side of the lagoon where Venice's spires evaporate in the moody dusk like wraiths.
Since at least the medieval religious pilgrimages, tourism has been heavily ridden by the cliched and the formulaic. But since the invention of the jet airliner, mass tourism has been swamped by the kitsch sensibility - the domestication, familiarization, and commodification of the so-called exotic experience. Disneyfication is no longer confined to Anaheim and Orlando, but suffuses African safaris, Icelandic jokull expeditions, and visits to Laotian hill tribes.
Mass air travel and mass tourism are inextricably linked, and you don't have to be Greta Thunberg to acknowledge their environmental unsustainability as currently configured, quite apart from negating the very reason for visiting something that is supposed to be outside of one's routinized experience. We need hardly add that the effects are contributing to the distinct possibility that Venice itself may sink beneath the waves altogether, although in the case of Miami's South Beach, my feelings are more ambiguous.
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Labor Strikes, Once Blunted by GOP and Corporations, are Back and Shaping Public Policy
Even within the private sector there are stirrings we have not heard in many years
Feb 07, 2019
If President Trump does try to start back up the government shutdown this month, he may face an insuperable obstacle. Just days before the (temporary?) ending of the government shutdown long time left scholar and activist Barbara Ehrenreich and former Teamster organizer Gary Stevenson urged TSA workers to go out on strike. Days later Sara Nelson, flight attendant union president, doubled down on Ehrenreich's request by calling for a General Strike.: "Go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together - To End this Shutdown with a General Strike."
How much of a role declining air service and/or the possibility of a broad walkout played in ending the shutdown is not clear. These events did, however, illustrate the vulnerabilities of our air traffic systems and the growing leverage workers might enjoy. As Ehrenreich and Stevenson pointed out, these workers actually do possess substantial leverage, something most working class members have been unable to say for over a generation now.
In any future battle TSA workers must balance their leverage against the risks they would face by going on strike. Put briefly, over any labor strike, especially by government workers, the ghost of PATCO hangs heavily. When the professional air traffic controllers went on strike early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, he ordered the firing of these workers and their replacement by military air traffic controllers.
Though most do jobs requiring less demanding skills, the current TSA personnel are not easily replaced en mass. Commercial air traffic would be brought to a standstill for several weeks. Though some--including me--might hope that such an eventuality would elicit a complete re-examination of the whole airline security system, such a result is unlikely. We are far more likely to die in an auto on our way to the airport than be murdered by a terrorist. Are these pat downs and scans not a serious diminution of our freedom?
What the Ehrenreich op ed as well as the individual actions by TSA personnel (declarations of illness and/or financial hardship) may do is lead to a broader discussion of the role of strikes in labor conflict.
What the Ehrenreich op ed as well as the individual actions by TSA personnel (declarations of illness and/or financial hardship) may do is lead to a broader discussion of the role of strikes in labor conflict. As capital became more mobile and global in the early seventies and as labor made an easy target for concerns about inflation, the strike headed toward extinction. Union density within the workforce steadily shrunk. Givebacks to management became the order of the day. In many states neoliberal legislatures and governors enacted prohibitions on strikes by public sector workers
The ground, however, may be shifting and teachers may be leading the way. Ehrenreich's and Stevenson's friendly suggestion that TSA collectively walk off the job is played against a backdrop of mass teacher strikes in red states, Oklahoma and West Virginia and blue Chicago and LA.
These strikes offer some lessons. Though low wages are one target, the strikes have been focused on demands that have a major impact on the quality of classroom instruction, including class size, modern textbooks, adequate support personnel, especially school nurses. More broadly these strikes have been an occasion to contest the whole issues of charter schools and the threat they pose to the very ideal of public education. When public schools are underfunded, for whatever reason, their poor performance can then be cited as justification for further expansion of the unregulated charter school empires. In an era dominated by neoliberal economics, such a strategy has been applied worldwide to such public health institution as the US VA and Canadian Medicare.
TSA personnel were not making outrageous demands. The request that they receive their already low wages on a timely basis was understood and accepted by public. I would hope that in the event of future strikes there will be more attention to the difficulties in performing one's job as food and childcare become harder to obtain. Will there be a future strike? Perhaps this is another lesson from the teachers. In WV and Oklahoma agitation for collective action came from the rank and file, with leaders only reluctantly tagging along. Whether this will be the case here remains to be seen, but these are volatile times.
Even within the private sector there are stirrings we have not heard in many years. Long time labor activist Kim Moody points out that competition and consolidation of supply chains controls costs by eliminating redundancy but also makes just in time systems vulnerable to work disruptions. Perhaps the strike is not really extinct.
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Public Workers' Trump Card
Never underestimate the power of airport delays to arouse the nation
Jan 28, 2019
Air traffic controllers hold the trump card (pardon the expression) in upcoming negotiations between Donald Trump and congressional Democrats over border security.
That's because the president and the Republicans know that another shutdown would likely cause a repeat of what happened last Friday, when so many of the nation's air traffic controllers called in sick that America's air traffic came to a near standstill. Hours later, Trump agreed to reopen the government without funding for his wall.
Never underestimate the power of airport delays to arouse the nation. Nancy Pelosi deserves credit for sticking to her guns, but the controllers brought the country to its knees.
Trump is threatening another shutdown if he doesn't get his way by 15 February, when government funding will run out again. "Does anybody really think I won't build the WALL?" he tweeted Sunday, after his acting chief of staff said that he was prepared to shutter the government for a second time.
But his threat is for the cameras. If there's no agreement this time around, the controllers won't work another 35 days without pay. Now that they understand their power, they will shut down the shutdown right away. Trump knows this.
Ironically, it was Ronald Reagan's audacious decision in 1981 to fire and replace more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who were then striking illegally that legitimized decades of union busting. It signaled to employers around the country that unions--both public and private-sector--were fair game.
It also unleashed political forces against unions, culminating last year with the supreme court's 5-4 decision in Janus v AFSCME, holding that government workers can't be forced to contribute to labor unions that represent them in collective bargaining.
But the decision last week by thousands of controllers not to come to work wasn't a strike, and it wasn't initiated by a union. Beforehand, Paul Rinaldi, the president of the controller's union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, even went so far as to announce that the union did not "condone or endorse any federal employees participating in or endorsing a coordinated activity that negatively effects the capacity of the National Airspace System".
The larger story is that public workers who lack any formal power to strike - but have the informal power not to work - are becoming a new force in American politics and labor relations.
Controllers simply stayed home. No federal law prohibits federal employees from getting sick or calling in sick. And who's to say it was coordinated? Today, the internet can spread information about a voluntary walkout as quickly and efficiently as any centralized coordinator.
The larger story is that public workers who lack any formal power to strike - but have the informal power not to work - are becoming a new force in American politics and labor relations.
Look what teachers accomplished last year by walking out of their classrooms in the unlikeliest of places - West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina. Most of these are Republican "right-to-work" states that bar strikes by public employees. In recent years, all have slashed school funding and eroded teacher pay and benefits.
Like the air traffic controllers, the teachers chose not to work rather than give in to what they considered intolerable conditions. These unauthorized "wildcat" strikes won gains in teachers' salaries and funding for schools. (Not incidentally, they also galvanized thousands of teachers to run for office in the 2018 midterm elections.)
They were especially powerful because they offered elected officials no union leader or chief organizer with whom to negotiate a deal, who would then sell it to rank-and-file workers. As with the air traffic controllers last week, officials had to back down because the people they were dealing with were all rank-and-file, and public pressure was mounting rapidly.
Not all public workers can expect similar results by walking off their jobs. The walkout has to cause a major and visible disruption. (A work stoppage by FDA inspectors would hardly be noticed, at least until the public begins to worry about toxic drugs and tainted meat.)
And the public has to be supportive. By the fifth week of Trump's shutdown, polls showed the public highly sympathetic to federal workers who hadn't been paid. Likewise, most Americans have been on the side of teachers. National polls have shown the public largely in favor of higher teacher pay and supportive of teachers' right to strike.
Finally, it's not a weapon that can be used often because it relies for its potency on public frustration and inconvenience. If walkouts by public employees in France and other nations are any guide, public patience eventually wears thin.
But when elected officials in the United States abuse their power or take actions that unnecessarily harm the public, walkouts by public workers can function as an important constraint.
In the age of Trump, we need all the constraints we can get.
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Does TSA Really Need a Watch List for "Unruly" Travelers?
The Transportation Security Administration's new "secret watch list" is purportedly meant to protect airport security screeners. But it could easily turn into an "enemies list" of people the TSA will target at airports.
May 24, 2018
Cross-posted from Just Security.
The New York Times reported last week that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had "created a new secret watch list" (which is also known as a "95 list") to "monitor people who may be targeted as potential threats at airport checkpoints simply because they have swatted away security screeners' hands or otherwise appeared unruly." According to the agency's lawyer, the 95 list is meant to protect airport security screeners, who "were assaulted 34 times last year, up from 26 in 2016." This justification for creating yet another watch list is weak, and the language of the directive is broad enough that the 95 list could easily turn into a sort of "enemies list" of people who the TSA will target at airports.
Let's start with the justification. Obviously, no TSA screener should be assaulted for doing her job. But 34 assaults seem miniscule compared to the 771 million passengers the agency screened over the course of 2017. Then there's the question of how the agency defines "assault." According to the directive, any injury to a TSA employee or foiled screening lands you on a different TSA watch list and earns you automatic "enhanced screening." So, "assault" for purposes of this new list must be something less. According to the directive, physical contact that is "offensive" or "without legal justification" can land you on the watch list, even if there is "no intent to injure or cause physical pain," much less an actual injury. This suggests that the threshold for what the TSA counts as assault is likely pretty low.
Most troublingly, however, the directive allows for people (most likely Americans, given the scope of the TSA's duties) to be nominated for the 95 list if they are the "subject of a credible threat of violence" or "are otherwise publicly notorious." The logic of the former seems to be that the traveler might be attacked at the airport and TSA agents would need to be on their guard. But what are the chances that someone would choose to carry out an attack on someone at an airport where they would be surrounded by security? Amazingly, the order suggests that individuals vulnerable to violence, such as women who have been victims of domestic abuse, belong on the list.
The wide-open category of "publicly notorious" of course allows the agency to nominate pretty much anyone with even a modest public profile, such as journalists or activists, for the 95 list. We know that the TSA is concerned about how it is perceived by such people, having just solicited bids for companies to monitor news sources to identify "any and all" coverage related to the agency, as well as to compile a database of journalists, editors, bloggers and the like, to identify "media influencers." Interestingly, the new watch list is not just based on reports of potential problem travelers coming from check points. Senior officials of the TSA's Office of Intelligence and Analysis can add people on their own initiative, suggesting that they may be making their own judgments based on unspecified information about who belongs on the list.
In fairness, the directive does include the standard caveat that watch listing may not be based "solely" on race, religion, national origin, ethnicity etc., but does allow these attributes to be considered as part of "the totality-of-the circumstances," where they are "both relevant and based on specific intelligence or threat information." The use of the word "solely," which is found in many law enforcement racial profiling guidelines, is often a way of eliding the prohibition. Police, and presumably TSA agents, can usually come up with an additional rationale (e.g., the so-called "furtive movements" used to justify the racially biased stop-and-frisk policy in New York City) to work around the policy. Given the TSA's long history of profiling travelers, the provision is cold comfort. The directive includes somewhat stronger First Amendment protections, stating that "engaging in First amendment protected activity shall not be a basis for nominations or placements" on the 95 list. But it provides no clues on how the agency will ensure that this doesn't happen, which is particularly troubling since the TSA previously identified "complaints of security procedures" as a behavior that could trigger greater scrutiny.
Finally, what's the point of the new watch list? According to the directive, it's mainly to ensure that TSA officers "remain vigilant." Individuals on the list are not required to undergo additional screening or be denied boarding "based solely" on their inclusion on the watch list. But it defies common sense to think that TSA screeners would not use additional security measures for people who have been tagged as troublesome. Moreover, the agency has discretion to notify "appropriate law enforcement resources" of pending travel or other information about people on the 95 list, which could open these individuals up to additional consequences.
The directive provides no way for people who are wrongfully added to the 95 list to know that they have been tagged or to be removed from the list. While one can understand why the TSA might not want people to know that they are on a watch list, the history of such lists suggests that they are riddled with mistakes that ensnare people who are not security threats at all.
In sum, there appears to be little justification for this new watch list and lots of questions about how it might be used to harass and intimidate agency critics and even just rude travelers. As part of their oversight duties, members of Congress should - at a a minimum - insist that DHS do a better job of explaining the need for the list, who will be on it, and how the agency will ensure that it is not abused. Better yet, they should work to bury this patently bad idea.
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'Shrouded in Secrecy': ACLU Wants Answers on TSA's Growing Practice of Searching Phones, Laptops, and Tablets
The TSA failed to respond to an earlier FOIA request regarding the procedures and protocols it follows to determine which travelers' devices can be searched
Mar 13, 2018
Civil liberty defenders are raising alarm over the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) increasingly common searches of domestic travelers' personal electronic devices, including laptops, tablets, and cell phones.
The TSA announced last October that it would begin using heightened procedures to screen electronics, but the details of how the policy is implemented and how agents decide which travelers can be subjected to a warrantless search of their devices remain "shrouded in secrecy," according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"Our phones and laptops contain very personal information, and the federal government should not be digging through our digital data without a warrant." --Vasudha Talla, ACLU
After receiving numerous complaints from Americans regarding what they say is an invasion of their privacy by the TSA, the ACLU's Northern California chapter filed suit on Monday, demanding information about TSA's procedures and protocols for searching travelers' electronics and equipment used to search or extract data from personal devices.
"TSA is searching the electronic devices of domestic passengers, but without offering any reason for the search," said Vasudha Talla, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "We don't know why the government is singling out some passengers, and we don't know what exactly TSA is searching on the devices. Our phones and laptops contain very personal information, and the federal government should not be digging through our digital data without a warrant."
The lawsuit comes three months after the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for details on the search policy, following which the TSA has "improperly withheld" the requested government documents.
"These are materials that should not be terribly difficult to track down," Talla told the Guardian, which first reported on the ACLU's suit. "We're just not clear what they're doing and why they're doing it."
The national ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation has also challenged Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) practice of searching the personal electronics of people entering the U.S. at border crossings without probable cause. Thirty-thousand searches were performed by the CBP in 2017, up from 5,000 two years earlier.
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The Illusion of Security
"Please be gentle."
The story is too easy to believe. At the Memphis airport, a confused, nervous teenager sets off the metal detector -- possibly because she has sequins on her shirt -- and is told she needs to come to a "sterile area." Armed guards show up to escort her. She's terrified.
Jul 08, 2016
"Please be gentle."
The story is too easy to believe. At the Memphis airport, a confused, nervous teenager sets off the metal detector -- possibly because she has sequins on her shirt -- and is told she needs to come to a "sterile area." Armed guards show up to escort her. She's terrified.
This happened a year ago. The girl, then 18, is Hannah Cohen. She was flying -- at least that was the idea -- back to Chattanooga with her mother, Shirley Cohen, who had just passed through the checkpoint and was waiting for Hannah when, according to a lawsuit the family recently filed, a TSA horror story began.
One other thing: Hannah had just undergone what was to be her final treatment for a brain tumor at St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. She'd been going through this treatment since she was 2 years old. The treatment -- radiation and surgery -- impaired her ability to function: "The brain tumor had left Hannah blind in one eye, deaf in one ear and partially paralyzed," according to The Guardian. When the guards grabbed her arms, the girl pulled away and tried to escape.
"Seeing the scene begin to unfold, Shirley" -- who had a broken foot -- "hobbled to a supervisor standing nearby," the Guardian continues. "'She is a St Jude's patient, and she can get confused,' (Shirley) said. 'Please be gentle. If I could just help her, it will make things easier.'"
Instead, the guards threw Hannah to the ground, smashing her face. Finally, all her mother could do was snap a photo. The girl was taken away -- to jail. Mom and daughter were separated for 24 hours. Hannah finally appeared before a judge. The charges against her were dropped.
A year later, the family filed a lawsuit.
Maybe there's more to the story than this. An airport spokesperson said as much to a local paper. Cause and effect may be more complex than the photo of Hannah's bleeding face that hit the news. But whatever the justification, or lack thereof, for the behavior of the airport security guards, what we have is one more example of Authority -- the nation's security apparatus -- reacting with brute force to a complex social situation. This does not make us safe.
What we have instead is a bureaucratic illusion of safety. James Bovard, in an op-ed column last year in USA Today, called it "security theater" -- a "routine that is far more effective at subjugating Americans than protecting them." He cited, for instance, an NBC story indicating that Transportation Security Administration agents, in June 2015, failed to detect "95 percent of the weapons and bombs smuggled past them by Inspector General testers," seeming to suggest that airport security is almost completely pointless.
I say this not to blame the security personnel. They're doing a difficult job, almost certainly without proper training. And if they're armed, the complexity of their social encounters magnifies exponentially. As I wrote last December, in the wake of a briefly newsworthy police killing:
"In Chicago, a police officer shoots a teenager walking in the middle of the street 16 times, almost as though the gun took control of the officer's consciousness. Barbara Ransby, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, interviewed recently by Democracy Now, pointed out that, because of budget cuts, only about 20 Chicago police officers have received crisis intervention training.
"My God, budget cuts! In a country that's waging perpetual war and raking in billions from the global sale of weapons. Yeah, the boy had been acting erratically. But real public safety for the city of Chicago would have included safety for Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old killed by police officer Jason Van Dyke.
"I fear we're reversing the evolutionary process. We've surrendered to simplistic, impulsive, fear-based 'safety' and we're reaping the consequences, one broken soul at a time."
We're reaping the consequences, indeed. Security is more than a matter of guns and enemies. As we militarize the illusion of security, more and more we become our own worst enemies.
"We imagine a line between good and evil . . ."
These are the words of Philip Zimbardo, addressing an Association of Psychological Science convention some years ago. He continued: ". . . and we like to believe that it's impermeable. We are good on this side. The bad guys, the bad women, they are on that side, and the bad people never will become good, and the good never will become bad. I'll say today that's nonsense. Because that line is ... permeable."
Zimbardo is the researcher who conducted the famously horrifying Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, in which a group of psychologically healthy male college students were assigned to play the role of prison guards, while another group of college kids were the pseudo-prisoners. Given such power, the guards quickly turned into a collective of sadists. The experiment had to be shut down early. Zimbardo called the phenomenon the Lucifer Effect. Ever since, he's been sounding the warning that ordinary men and women, in a context of too much power (think, for instance, Abu Ghraib), can cross that line and turn into representatives of evil.
And consider, as Bovard pointed out, that an early TSA motto was "Dominate. Intimidate. Control."
This is the context in which I hear, all too clearly, a mom call out, "Please be gentle." And I think about a nation that has no idea how to protect itself.
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Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson Takes High-School Detention to a New Level
May 26, 2016
Thursday, Jan. 28, was a cold morning in Durham, North Carolina. Wildin David Guillen Acosta went outside to head to school, but never made it. He was thrown to the ground and arrested by agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He has been in detention ever since. Wildin, now 19 years old, fled his home in Olancho, Honduras more than two years ago. He was detained when crossing the border, but, as he was a minor at the time, he was allowed to join his family in North Carolina. He started out at Riverside High School, and was set to graduate this June. He wanted to become an engineer. Instead, he has been locked up in the notorious Stewart Detention Center in rural Lumpkin, Georgia, which is run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America.
Wildin is just one of hundreds of thousands of children who have fled the violence of Central America in recent years, either alone or, often, with their mothers. They come primarily from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Honduras is now one of the world's most violent countries, and Olancho has one of the highest murder rates there, causing many to flee. The U.S. Army and the Drug Enforcement Administration both have special-forces units permanently stationed there, joining in counternarcotics operations that have also killed Hondurans.
Wildin was arrested in part of a series of immigration raids, dubbed "Operation Border Guardian." Many believe its intent was to create fear among those still in Central America who might consider taking the perilous journey north to the U.S. "As I have said repeatedly, our borders are not open to illegal migration," Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said at the time. "If you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values." Immediately after Wildin's arrest, family, friends, classmates and teachers at Riverside High demonstrated their values, rallying to support him and five others who were similarly arrested. The group of imprisoned youth is often referred to as the "NC6." Durham's Human Relations Commission appealed to ICE to release him, as did the Durham City Council.
"There is so much fear in our community, because, unfortunately, he is not the only child that they have detained," said one of Wildin's teachers, Ellen Holmes, in a support video. "It's creating absences and dropouts in our schools. It's creating just a huge feeling of fear inside our school and in our community." While there is scant evidence that the mass arrests and deportations have slowed the flow of Central American refugees to the U.S., they have certainly scared students and families currently here, forcing them to keep their kids out of school lest they be swept up like Wildin.
Wildin's request for asylum was denied, and on March 19, an immigration judge denied his appeal to reopen his case. He was set for deportation back to Honduras on March 20. However, bowing to the enormous public pressure brought by this youth-led grass-roots organizing, ICE Director Sarah Saldana issued an order that morning, delaying his deportation. Wildin's case for asylum is before the Board of Immigration Appeals, a process that could take months or even years to resolve.
"He should be released. Ninety days, by any standard, is an egregious period of time to be spending in detention," Paromita Shah told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour. She is the associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, and was in Washington, D.C., with several Riverside High students and teacher Ellen Holmes, visiting members of Congress and Education Secretary John B. King Jr., asking them to support Wildin.
Axel Herrera was one of the students who went to Washington. Like Wildin, he was an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, but entered at the age of 7, and thus qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. "We've talked to representatives. We've made calls. We've sent letters. We've gotten support from a few of our congressmen in North Carolina to ask for their release," he told us. "But we haven't had the response we've wanted, which is to have Wildin and have some of the other NC6 back at our schools."
Wildin Acosta remains locked up in ICE's private prison in Georgia. His request that his schoolwork be sent to him was initially denied. After public outcry, the warden relented. Many high-school students get detention for refusing to study. Wildin is stuck in permanent detention, and he has to fight for his right to study. That is determination and commitment Jeh Johnson and everyone at ICE should agree is "consistent with our values."
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