ICE, ICE MAYBE... We Should Pay the TSA?
The People Protecting You at 35,000 Feet Are Donating Bodily Fluids Between Shifts Because Congress Thinks Deporting a Dishwasher Is More Important Than Stopping a Bomb
I am not flying to see my family for Easter because the federal government decided that paying the people who check bags for explosives is optional and I have a strong personal preference for not being âexplo-deadâ by whatever âIranian terrorist groupâ the government has decided to blame nuclear WW3 on.
That is a real sentence about a real thing happening right now in the United States of America. The people standing between you and a bomb on your flight to Denver are lining up at donation centers between shifts because the federal government has decided they donât deserve a paycheck. They have missed three paychecks, and they have spent roughly half of this fiscal year working for what amounts to a firm handshake and a promise that someone in Congress is thinking about maybe possibly considering paying them eventually. Some of them get up at 3:30 in the morning, put on the uniform, stand in front of an X-ray machine for eight hours scanning your carry-on for things that explode, go home, and try to figure out which bills they can skip this month so their kids can eat something that isnât creative interpretations of ramen.
Three hundred of them have quit. Sick callouts are running at five times the normal rate, which means the line between âfunctioning airport securityâ and âhonor systemâ is getting thinner by the day. The head of the TSA union, Everett Kelley, said something last week that deserves to be printed on the boarding pass of every member of Congress: âDo not get on a plane that a TSA officer screened for free and fly home for Easter dinner.â That is not a union talking point. That is a man who has completely run out of polite ways to say that his people are donating bodily fluids to keep the lights on while protecting your family from getting blown out of the sky at 35,000 feet.
Meanwhile, ICE agents are not only getting paid, they are being recruited with the enthusiasm normally reserved for Division I quarterbacks, except instead of throwing footballs they will be throwing families into detention vans. The government is offering new ICE recruits a $50,000 signing bonus, broken into $10,000 annual chunks, because apparently even government bribery comes with a layaway plan now. Congress handed ICE $76.5 billion through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is roughly ten times the agencyâs normal annual budget and also the most Orwellian name for a piece of legislation since the Patriot Act. Thirty billion of that is specifically for hiring. They have received 220,000 applications.
A deportation officer starts between $51,000 and $84,000 before overtime and bonuses, which is nearly double what a TSA officer makes, assuming the TSA officer is making anything at all, which they are not. The oversight structure for this rapidly assembled paramilitary hiring spree is, as far as anyone can tell, roughly equivalent to a fantasy football league.
The government, demonstrating the kind of problem-solving instincts that make you wonder how we ever landed on the moon, decided to deploy ICE agents to airports during the shutdown to fill in for the TSA officers they refuse to pay. The TSA union pointed out, with admirable restraint, that ICE agents have not been trained to screen passengers or operate security equipment. They are not qualified to do the job. Congress sent them anyway, because nothing says ânational securityâ like replacing the bomb-detection specialists with people whose primary field experience involves showing up at a meatpacking plant at 5 AM to arrest people who have been doing jobs that no American has applied for since 1987. (If you are flying anywhere in the next two weeks, by the way, the person operating the body scanner may have received their total aviation security training from a pamphlet and a firm handshake.) Kelley compared this to âgiving a person dying of pneumonia a teaspoon of cough syrup,â which is generous. It is more like handing a drowning man a brochure about swimming lessons, billing him for it, and then arresting the lifeguard for being Mexican.
Either the people running this country are the dumbest collection of human beings ever assembled in a room with a gavel, or they are doing this on purpose.
And I have spent enough time around people with money and power to tell you that they are not dumb. They went to the best schools. They have teams of lawyers. They can read a spreadsheet. They know exactly what happens when you defund airport security and pour ten times the normal budget into a deportation force that answers to one political project and one political project only.
Real terrorists do not wade across the Rio Grande with a bindle stick. That is not how it works, and that has never been how it works. The 9/11 hijackers entered the country legally, with visas, through airports, wearing normal clothes, and smiling at the gate agent. The people who stop that from happening again are intelligence analysts, TSA screeners, FBI counterterrorism units, and the entire unglamorous bureaucratic apparatus of homeland security that doesnât make for good television or fit on a campaign hat. You know who is not a national security threat? A middle-aged couple from Oaxaca with three kids who work twelve-hour days for five bucks an hour pulling guts out of the trough chute at a slaughterhouse in rural Nebraska. They are not planning anything, they are not waiting for orders from a shadow network, and they are trying to not die. The slaughterhouse knows theyâre there, the manager knows, the company knows, everyone has always known. Nobody cares until it becomes politically useful to pretend to be horrified.
If you wanted to dismantle a functioning democracy (and I mean really dismantle it, not just yell about it on a podcast while selling vitamin supplements), you would do it exactly like this.
You would defund the agencies that protect everyone. You would flood money into the agencies that answer to one man. You would let the courts back up, let the infrastructure rot, let the professional civil servants quit or starve, and you would replace them with 220,000 fresh applicants who showed up because someone put a recruitment ad on Spotify promising fifty grand.
Spotify, a company whose primary contribution to civilization is letting you listen to Rihanna in the shower, pulled the recruitment ads after backlash. A Swedish music streaming company has more institutional shame about this situation than the United States Congress.
And when the whole thing finally buckles (and it will buckle, because you cannot run a country on vibes and deportation quotas), the people who engineered it will not be standing in the rubble with you. They will be in the bunkers your tax dollars built, behind the doors your tax dollars reinforced, eating the food your tax dollars stockpiled. They will be waiting patiently for the courts that would have convicted them for what they did to those kids on that island to stop existing, because courts require a functioning government, and there wonât be one anymore. That is not a side effect of incompetence, that is the entire business model.
The ICE agents with the fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonuses and the six weeks of training wonât be deporting anyone by then. They will be the enforcement arm of whatever comes next. Knights of a new aristocracy, which (and here is the part where Iâd laugh if it werenât so perfectly, geometrically evil) your great-grandparents bled into the dirt at Normandy and Iwo Jima specifically so you would never have to live under.
They had several words for governments that replace professional institutions with a loyal private army, and none of them are âdemocracy,â and most of them end with flags that only have one color on them.
I want to ask a serious question, and I would genuinely like someone in Washington to answer it, although I know they wonât because the answer is the kind of thing that looks very bad when you say it out loud in a room with cameras. What is ICE?
Not what does the acronym stand for. I know what the acronym stands for. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But what is it, functionally, in practice, right now, today? Because this is an agency that was created in 2003 as part of the post-9/11 reorganization of the federal government, and in the twenty-three years since, it has evolved into something that no longer resembles the thing it was sold to the American public as. It was supposed to investigate cross-border crime, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and customs fraud. Those are real jobs that require real expertise and serve a real public interest. But that is not what ICE is doing at airports right now. It is not what ICE was doing when it was running recruitment ads on Spotify. It is not what ICE is doing when it sends agents to a church shelter in Chicago at 6 AM to arrest a grandmother from Honduras who has been living in the same apartment for eleven years and whose biggest crime is making tamales for the neighbors at Christmas.
So what is it? Is it an immigration agency? It doesnât process immigration paperwork, thatâs USCIS. Is it a law enforcement agency? It doesnât investigate crimes the way the FBI does, and its agents are being deployed to airports where they have no relevant training, which is not something you do with a serious law enforcement body. Is it a border security agency? Thatâs CBP, which is a completely different organization with completely different jurisdiction. Is it a counterterrorism agency? It has never stopped a terrorist attack. Is it a TSA replacement? The TSA union says no, loudly, repeatedly, and with the kind of exasperation that suggests they have been saying it so many times that they are considering having it printed on t-shirts.
What ICE actually is, right now, in March of 2026, is a federally funded, rapidly expanding enforcement apparatus with ten times its normal budget, minimal oversight, a quarter-million applicants, a $50,000 signing bonus, and a mandate that begins and ends with the political priorities of one man. It does not answer to a coherent institutional mission. It does not have a fixed operational scope. It goes where it is told to go, it does what it is told to do, and it is being scaled up faster than any domestic federal force in modern American history.
There is a historical parallel for this, and it is not a comfortable one, and I am not going to be cute about it. In the early 1930s, the German government built a large, loosely organized, rapidly recruited enforcement body that operated outside traditional law enforcement structures, answered directly to party leadership rather than institutional chains of command, was used interchangeably for crowd control, political intimidation, and whatever else needed doing on a given Tuesday, and was funded lavishly while the actual civil service starved. They were called the Sturmabteilung. The SA. The brownshirts. And before anyone fires up the âyou canât compare everything to Nazisâ defense, I want to point out that I am not comparing the individual ICE agents to Nazis. I am comparing the structural blueprint to the structural blueprint, because the structural blueprint is identical, and pretending it isnât because the uniforms are a different color is exactly how it worked the first time.
That is the math, and it is not complicated. Pay the people who find the bombs, or pay the people who are loyal to the men who are terrified of what those bombs are protecting you long enough to find out about.
The next flight out of Logan, or JFK, or OâHare was screened by someone who hasnât been paid in six weeks. And somewhere in Washington right now, a congressman who just voted to hand ICE ten times its budget is booking a first-class seat home for Easter recess on an airplane that a plasma-selling, bill-skipping, ramen-inventing TSA agent screened this morning for absolutely free.
Have a good flight, Congressman, and thank you for not paying the person who kept it from exploding.
Usually I don't disagree so strongly with the Wolf, but he's way off base.
TSA is a useless organization., It has prevented Zero-point-Zero attacks in its 24 year existence. It has consistently failed tests. Over 80% of prohibited items run through TSA in tests get through. TSA contributes nothing to security. Return airport security to the airlines/airports.
As far as ICE assisting TSA is concerned, from what I've seen they're taking over tasks such as checking IDs, etc., so the "trained" TSA agents can run the scanners/x-ray machines (not that it matters if the test results are correct).
I get it: ICE can be a bad look at the airports. But no security is being sacrificed.
Itâs not the federal government who isnât paying TSA, itâs the demorats who are d!cking around with appearances. They probably think this will help them in the midterms, (!) being that theyâre manipulative morons. Good luck.