What happened
Former senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) was sworn in as secretary of
the Department of Homeland Security this week, as lawmakers struggled to reach a deal to end a weeks-long DHS shutdown that is causing chaos at major airports. The Senate confirmed Mullin by a comfortable 54-45 margin after he sold himself as a more pragmatic alternative to his ousted predecessor, Kristi Noem. But the partial government shutdown has left his department with no new funds since Feb. 14, and around 90% of the DHS workforce has been working without pay. Only ICE and Border Patrol workers are still getting paychecks, and only because they were funded out of last year’s “big, beautiful bill.”
At airports, thousands of unpaid TSA agents have called in sick, and nearly 500 have quit altogether. With waits at security lines topping three hours at some major hubs, President Trump ordered ICE to deploy its agents as extra hands—even though ICE agents are not trained to operate TSA X-ray scanners. The crowds at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, where a crash between an Air Canada Express jet and a fire truck killed two pilots and wounded dozens, blocked investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board from getting to the scene. They had to “beg” to be let through, said NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. “It’s been a really big challenge to get the entire team here.”
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What the columnists said
Deploying ICE to airports is “a stunt, not a policy solution,” said The Washington Post in an editorial, and has produced little besides social media images of camo-clad agents idling in terminals. Note that these extreme delays are not happening in the 20 U.S. airports that are allowed to use private contractors to perform TSA screenings; we should clearly expand that program to avoid future airport snarls. For now, though, “the quickest solution is to fund DHS.” The Republican plan would have gotten partway there by resuming paychecks for employees of most of the department’s agencies, including the TSA, the Coast Guard, and FEMA.
Democrats had plenty of reason to balk at the GOP proposal, said Aaron
Blake in CNN.com. Treating ICE funding separately would have robbed them of their ability to insist on reforms that “appeared to be quite popular,” including restrictions on agents wearing masks and raiding churches and schools. That, after all, was their original rationale for the shutdown, which grew out of their outrage at ICE’s killings of three Americans. Plus, they point out, it wasn’t just ICE involved in the violent crackdowns in Minneapolis and elsewhere, but also Border Patrol and other Homeland Security agents. “They have everybody at DHS right now doing immigration enforcement,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), so by funding any part of the department,“you’re providing money for immigration enforcement.”
Yet under Mullin, such enforcement might be less confrontational, said Dace Potas in USA Today. The new DHS secretary “at least speaks the right language.” He pledged that his immediate goal for DHS was to ensure “we’re not in the lead story every single day”—a blessed change from Noem’s showboating. The Trump administration is trying to signal a more moderate approach, said Erika D. Smith in Bloomberg, having abandoned the phrase “mass deportations.” Still, Mullin is “an immigration hawk who has repeatedly backed Trump’s crackdown in cities” and called undocumented immigrants “federal fugitives.” Worse, he has “no experience running anything beyond his family’s plumbing business.”
“Everyone will have their own views” on what should or shouldn’t change about U.S. immigration policy, said Margaret White in The Detroit News, “but holding the American people hostage is not a responsible or effective way” to implement them. Spring break travel season is here, and millions of us are “disgusted and outraged” at seeing “our airports, TSA officers, and all of us” reduced to “bargaining chips in a partisan game.” Lawmakers “need to get in a room—now—to resolve this, and not leave until they do.”