Why Is Trump Telling ICE Agents At Airports Not To Wear Masks?

Source: Megan Varner / Getty

When it comes to the Trump administration’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement at U.S. airports, where they’ve supposedly been sent to assist TSA — which is short-staffed because it turns out a lot of people would rather quit their jobs than work without pay — people have a lot of questions.

Is the deployment really helping to reduce travelers’ wait times at the airport? Some airports are reporting shorter lines, while others report the lines are still just as long and miserable as ever. Is ICE actually doing anything, or are agents just standing around watching TSA agents do the job that only they are trained to do? We’ve seen footage of agents who appear to be getting paid to observe the government workers who aren’t.

But let’s start with one question that may, on the surface, seem to address something of lesser importance, but is certainly relevant: Why is President Donald Trump suddenly insisting that ICE agents don’t wear masks?

“I am a BIG proponent of ICE wearing masks as they search for, and are forced to deal with, hardened criminals,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Monday. “I would greatly appreciate, however, NO MASKS, when helping our Country out of the Democrat caused MESS at the airports, etc. Thank you!”

For the sake of this write-up, I’ll go ahead and bypass Trump lying about ICE targeting criminals and blaming Democrats for the shutdowns that keep happening on the GOP-controlled Congress’ and his MAGA administration’s watch — a claim even some Republicans are debunking — as we have already covered these subjects numerous times. Let’s just focus on the mask thing for now.

Since the start of Trump’s massive (and massively racist and xenophobic) immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has insisted that its immigration agents can and should wear masks while in the performance of their duties for fear that they would be photographed and doxxed by a general public that does not want them there. These fears intensified after the extrajudicial executions of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota. The DOJ even sued the state of California over its policy prohibiting federal agents from wearing masks.

So, why no masks now? Immigration agents haven’t become any less unpopular. They’re still conducting immigration arrests at the airports, and, in fact, the Trump administration, including Trump himself, has said they would.

So, what’s the difference?

Could it be that, in an effort to put a positive face (pun intended) on his idea to send ICE to the airports, he has completely abandoned his and his administration’s bullshit about how federal agents must conceal their identities to protect themselves from the harm of public scrutiny and disdain?

Anyway, circling back to some of my earlier questions, according to Forbes, there are still approximately 50,000 TSA agents working without pay, while ICE agents are still making a base salary that ranges from $52,000 to $84,000 annually, because congressional Republicans allocated $75 billion to the agency as part of Trump’s “Big, beautiful bill,” which was at the center of the first government shutdown of the president’s second term. This leaves us with another glaring question: Why TF aren’t we paying TSA agents if we’re paying ICE agents to assist them because they’re understaffed due to non-payment?

It’s almost as if there’s a reason TSA union leaders are currently expressing their resentment of Trump’s airport deployment.

From the New York Times:

Leaders of a union representing Transportation Safety Administration workers blasted the Trump administration’s deployment of immigration enforcement agents to airports, which the government claims will help alleviate long security lines but the union calls a pointless distraction.

“No way ICE can guarantee safety of the passengers,” Hydrick Thomas, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees T.S.A. Council 100 union, told reporters at a news conference, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “All ICE is doing is just getting in the way.”

“The administration sent ICE agents to airports as replacement workers. That’s like giving a person dying of pneumonia a teaspoon of cough syrup,” said Everett Kelley, the national president of A.F.G.E. “It doesn’t address the problem, and it’s not going to work.”

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, ICE agents reportedly began checking travelers’ IDs and performing other screening duties that, again, they are not trained for.

Look, when it comes to this administration, we often find ourselves asking, “What the hell are we even doing here?” So, this is just another one of Trump’s bright ideas that leave all of us outside of his dim-witted, ever-faithful MAGA base scratching our heads and wondering when the nation got this stupid. But it’s important to remember and not normalize the truth that these policies aren’t just idiotic and contradictory as hell; they’re dangerous — whether they’re being masked or not.

SEE ALSO:

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Trump Sends ICE To US Airports To Help TSA And Target Immigrants, Of Course