President Trump has deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to major airports across the country amid staffing shortages caused by the partial government shutdown.
After funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsed in mid-February, Transportation Security Administration employees have been left to work without pay. Since then, more than 480 agents have quit, according to TSA’s deputy administrator, Ha Nguyen McNeill, and thousands more have called out of work each day. Meanwhile, ICE has been unaffected, because Congress allocated a separate $75 billion in funds to the agency last summer.
Here’s a look at what experts say ICE agents have the authority to do, and what their presence at airports might look like.
What are ICE agents authorized to do?
When ICE was created as part of DHS in 2003, Congress gave the agency wide power to question, search and arrest undocumented immigrants, or those believed to be undocumented immigrants, without a warrant.
Immigration enforcement — especially in its early days — primarily targeted undocumented immigrants who had already been arrested for crimes committed in the United States, according to Theresa Brown, a non-resident immigration law and policy fellow at Cornell Law School.
The agency is authorized to issue arrest warrants, stop and question anyone they have “reasonable suspicion” to believe might be undocumented, detain and prosecute people living in the U.S. illegally and deport them, Brown said.
“In addition, as federal law enforcement officers, they can arrest people under any existing criminal statute when they witness a crime,” she said.
“So they have pretty broad authorities both under immigration law and just sort of as federal law enforcement officers.”
ICE agents’ powers expanded under Trump administration
“Two significant developments have occurred and accelerated during the second Trump administration,” Hiroshi Motomura, co-director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, told NPR via email.
The first, he said, was how the administration has allowed ICE to conduct its operations. The agency has faced criticism for its confrontational tactics, including allowing masked, plainclothes officers to arrest and detain people who they suspect to be in the country illegally.
The second change is that ICE has been “separately and extravagantly funded,” to the extent that it’s not directly affected by the current partial government shutdown, Motomura noted.
He warned that these sorts of sweeping changes could have damaging effects.
“The real problem and real danger is that ICE is being transformed into a police force that operates under more aggressive rules that are traditionally lawful and accepted only at the border (not inside the USA) and operates under a separate (very ample) budget,” he wrote.
So what does this all mean for ICE presence at airports?
When NPR asked DHS on Thursday whether ICE is operating under more aggressive rules, Lauren Bis, an acting assistant secretary, did not address the question and sent a statement saying that ICE agents were working to support the TSA by “guarding entrances and exits, assisting with logistics, doing crowd control, and verifying identification using TSA equipment and standard operating procedures.”
“The more support we have available, the more efficiently TSA can focus on their highly specialized screening roles to efficiently get airport security lines moving faster,” she said.
White House border czar Tom Homan is in charge of the new program, prompting questions about whether the agents’ primary goal will be to help TSA more efficiently ferry through passengers, or continue Trump’s aggressive crackdown on suspected undocumented immigrants.
“They’re supposed to help facilitate the process of getting people through TSA. They can’t do the work of TSA, but they’re supposed to facilitate by taking over some of the activities related to security,” said Paul Ong, director of UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge.
“But they still have the other mandate, that is, ICE is an agency that’s created for enforcement, within the U.S., and so that will still be with them. While they’re there, they will carry out what they believe is their charge of identifying potential immigrants who are not in this country legally,” he added.
In comments made Monday on Fox News’ Hannity, Homan made it clear that targeting criminal activity was indeed a core component of ICE’s airport presence.
“We’re doing a security function at the airports. We’re going to arrest criminals going through the airport. We’re going to arrest criminals going through this airport. We’re going to look for human trafficking, sex trafficking, money smuggling,” he said.
He also said that long wait times had dropped, though as of Wednesday, travelers were still facing the longest TSA wait times in history.
