Trump threatens to deploy ICE agents to airports Monday if funding deal isn’t reached

By Alejandra Jaramillo, Riane Lumer, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Saturday he will deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to US airports on Monday if an agreement isn’t reached to fund the Department of Homeland Security as Transportation Security Administration workers go without pay and travel disruptions mount.

“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 president wrote on Truth Social. “I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!”

A partial government shutdown has led to TSA staffing shortages that have contributed to delays, with unpredictable wait times expected to continue throughout weekend. Lawmakers have been working to reach an agreement to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, but even as they’re eager to reach a deal in the next week before Congress leaves town for a lengthy spring recess, a resolution remains uncertain.

It is unclear what function the ICE agents would perform since they’re not trained in airport security screening. TSA screeners have a monthslong training period before they’re on the job, though airline employees and private security companies have partnered on line controlling and guarding exit doors.

The agents could potentially help in more limited roles — like managing lines, directing passengers or helping move people through the checkpoint process — to free up trained TSA officers for critical security functions.

CNN has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, which includes TSA, and the White House for more information.

Trump suggested in an earlier Truth Social post on Saturday that the ICE agents would “do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest” of undocumented immigrants, with Trump specifying “heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”

Democrats have been demanding changes that would rein in Trump’s immigration policies after two people were killed during an immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis earlier this year. They’ve been pushing for stand-alone funding for TSA, while Republicans have rejected a piecemeal approach to funding DHS.

Bipartisan appropriators held a brief meeting with White House border czar Tom Homan Friday evening that sources from both parties called “productive.” Multiple Republicans said the GOP had bolstered its latest offer to Democrats, though they declined to specify how the White House was proposing to address Democrats’ demands.

Another meeting with Homan that Senate Majority Leader John Thune had previewed for Saturday has been cancelled, a GOP leadership source said, but it was unclear why.

Democrats on Saturday quickly condemned Trump’s threat to use ICE, with Sen. Richard Blumenthal telling reporters such usage of agents “as a general kind of militia or state police is contrary to the Constitution, the law of the United States, and common sense.”

“If the president is serious about providing TSA salaries, he ought to agree with us that ICE should be forced to obey the law, not deployed helter-skelter around the United States as an all-purpose police force,” the Connecticut Democrat added.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia argued that Trump’s word is “worthless,” and that the threat is “one more reason why we’ve got to get TSA funded.”

Republican Sen. John Kennedy, meanwhile, said “it could help” to send ICE agents to airports, but suggested that it’s not a definitive solution to the long security lines.

“If they’re planning on using some of the ICE folks to help with crowd control to free up TSA people to do the screening, I could see a scenario where that might help,” the Louisiana lawmaker told CNN, adding, “Unless those ICE folks can be trained really quickly to become TSA agents … it will be supportive but not dispositive.”

Thune said he hopes a deal can be reached on DHS funding so that “ideally” it “wouldn’t be necessary” to have ICE agents at airports.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Aaron Cooper, Richa Sharma, Dalia Abdelwahab, Veronica Stracqualursi and Camila DeChalus contributed to this report.