House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday criticized President Trump’s plan to deploy ICE agents to airports, warning that putting “untrained individuals” in close contact with travelers in high-pressure security situations could get people killed.
“The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or, in some instances, kill them,” Mr. Jeffries said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The New York Democrat argued that ICE agents are not properly trained even for their current jobs, let alone for the demands of airport security.
“We have already seen how ICE conducts itself,” he said. “These are untrained individuals when it comes to doing the current job that they have, for the most part, let alone deploying them in close exposure in highly sensitive situations at airports across the country.”
Mr. Jeffries said he supports a standalone bill to pay TSA agents separately from the broader DHS funding fight, noting that Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and John Kennedy of Louisiana have signaled support for the idea.
“Let’s bring those bills to the floor in the House and the Senate tomorrow so we can get TSA agents paid,” Mr. Jeffries said.
He also laid out the Democratic conditions for ending the standoff, calling for ICE agents to be required to obtain judicial warrants before entering homes, independent oversight of detention centers, and “independent investigations so that, if ICE agents break the law, they can be investigated and criminally prosecuted by state and local authorities.”
“These are all commonsense, reasonable things that the American people are appropriately demanding, and we’re not going to back away from them,” he said.
Mr. Jeffries accused Republicans of deliberately prolonging the crisis to extract political leverage, saying the GOP would rather “create chaos at airports throughout the land” than agree to put ICE under control.
“It’s unfortunate that Republicans have decided they would rather force TSA agents to work without pay, inconvenience millions of Americans all across the country, and now potentially expose them to untrained ICE agents,” he said.
