Marisa Kabas has been collecting pictures and stories of ICE agents in airports. The short story is that they’re standing around doing nothing, but they don’t have masks on. There’s some video of them assaulting one traveler in San Francisco, but other than that, they’re not helping and they’re not hurting.
I was watching yesterday’s initial NTSB briefing about the plane crash at LaGuardia, and NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy mentioned that not all the investigators were on site yet, giving the example of one who was in a security line in Houston for three hours until someone from the NTSB had the TSA move her through. At this moment, airports are a miserable combination of waiting hours in line coupled with the (legitimate) fear that an overworked air traffic controller might make a mistake like the one that doomed the pilots of the Air Canada flight Sunday night. An added feature is that flights are getting more expensive because the price of oil went up.
These problems are all Trump’s fault. The downside of the “flooding the zone with shit” strategy is that Trump’s action take all the bandwidth of the media, so much so that the message that Democrats refused to fund Homeland Security, and that’s why the TSA has a lot of absentees, isn’t getting through. Plus, it should make the more reflective traveler wonder why ICE agents show up and TSA isn’t getting paid. Could it be that perhaps some fuckery is occurring?
The fact that ICE agents are in plain clothes and doing nothing is, to me, a reflection on Homan (and perhaps Miller) knowing that there’s an ICE image problem that would only be worsened if they showed up looking like stormtroopers. I realize that Trump wants to use these guys like secret police, and he’s sure going to want to try to fuck with the elections, but I’m struggling to see this deployment as anything else but a lame effort at damage control. I don’t see it as “practice” to mess with elections (there’s one or two airports in most cities, but hundreds of polling places). It’s just a tacit acknowledgement that there’s a big problem in the airports and a big problem with ICE.
