The Hartmann Report

03/27/2026

A five-week Republican-caused partial government shutdown has left nearly 50,000 TSA agents working without pay. More than 480 have quit, thousands more call in sick daily, and airport security lines at Atlanta, Houston, and JFK have stretched to five hours or more. It’s a genuine crisis affecting millions of ordinary American travelers.

And it’s a crisis Trump has had the power to end every day since it started by simply demanding and signing a clean funding bill, which Democrats have repeatedly presented to Congress and Republicans have repeatedly blocked.

Instead, Trump and shadow-president Miller sent in their ICE thugs.

ICE agents were deployed to more than a dozen airports on Monday, according to the New York Times, wearing vests with their agency’s name, standing near identification processing locations, walking through terminal halls, generally scaring and intimidating people.

The Times notes that there was an obvious alternative if Trump actually wanted airport security help: U.S. Customs agents are already in airports doing security checks and passport verification, they’re trained for the environment, and deploying them to ID checkpoints would have been, as former ICE official Darius Reeves told the Times, “a less politically charged decision.”

But Trump didn’t want a less politically charged decision: he wanted ICE, which has become essentially his own private army, as he told us so himself.