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— Opinion —

The Real Reason Your Airport Is Now A Disaster Zone

This is their "Foreigners First" ideology perfectly illustrated.

By  Matt Walsh
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   DailyWire.com
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The Real Reason Your Airport Is Now A Disaster Zone
Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images

If you have been in an airport at any point over the past few weeks, you know that they are a disaster zone right now. Even more than they usually are. Over the weekend, the chaos descended to the point that some airports were reporting four or five-hour wait times at security.

This is all being blamed on the government shutdown. But if you look back at all previous government shutdowns in American history, you won’t find anything like the breakdown that’s currently taking place in Congress — which is now resulting in those five-hour TSA lines at major airports all over the country.

Source: @Breaking911/X.com

Source: @mattvanswol/X.com

To give just one example of how bad it’s gotten, a reporter at Reason Magazine in New Orleans wrote: 

I arrived at the airport 3 hours & 40 minutes before my flight. I ran up to the gate—no exaggeration—as they were about to give my seat away (on the last flight out).

The highest call-out rates among TSA agents this weekend were at the following airports:

  • Houston Hobby Airport (where 47% of TSA agents didn’t show up for work)
  • George Bush Intercontinental Airport, also in Houston (42% call out rate)
  • New Orleans International (34%)
  • Atlanta (33%)
  • JFK (33%)
  • Baltimore (29%)
  • Chicago Midway (29%)
  • Pittsburgh (23%)
  • Philadelphia (31%)
  • LaGuardia (17%)

Because TSA officers aren’t allowed to be furloughed, all of these absences were unauthorized. Most of these TSA agents are simply pretending to be sick. You can draw your own conclusion as to why the TSA officers living in the biggest urban centers in the country are more likely to abandon their posts than everyone else, but whatever the case, the result has obviously been disastrous for millions of Americans.

And it’s a unique situation, in many ways. This shutdown is not simply the result of a bog-standard funding dispute, or opposition to a major new direction in American policy (like Obamacare). Instead, it’s about undermining the existing authority of the Executive Branch and *punishing American citizens*, all in the name of foreigners who have become the primary constituency of the Democratic Party. The way Democrats see it, Americans should suffer, and our airports should fall into total dysfunction, in service of the open-borders agenda.

Put another way, the TSA catastrophe is the Democratic Party in a nutshell. This is their “Foreigners First” ideology, perfectly illustrated.

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You may have heard that this shutdown is about “preventing abuses by ICE” or something along those lines. But that’s not remotely true.

First of all, when Democrats talk about “abuses by ICE,” they’re referring to Left-wing agitators like Renee Good who get shot when they try to run over federal agents with their SUV, or otherwise violently interfere with law enforcement operations. Or they’re talking about debunked stories, like “ICE used a child as bait” (when in reality, the child’s father abandoned him on the side of the road). So the entire narrative is a fabrication.

But more importantly, even if ICE agents were going around terrorizing American citizens — which they aren’t — this shutdown wouldn’t do anything to stop them. Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed last summer, ICE (along with Customs and Border Protection) has already been funded to the tune of $75 billion — which won’t run out for several years.

Therefore, the best Democrats can hope for is that, if they shut down TSA long enough and make it impossible for Americans to board a plane, then the White House might offer some concessions on how ICE goes about its day-to-day operations.

In particular, Democrats are demanding that ICE agents take off their masks (so that they’re easier to doxx), stay away from schools and hospitals, and restrict immigration enforcement to foreigners who have committed multiple serious crimes (in addition to illegally entering the country, which Democrats obviously don’t see as a crime at all).

Democrats also demand that ICE obtain a “judicial warrant” from a federal judge every time they want to arrest an illegal alien inside a residence, instead of an “administrative warrant” (which is approved within the Executive Branch). In other words, Democrats believe that illegal aliens are entitled to the same constitutional protections as American citizens, and they don’t want to fight the issue in court because they know they’re going to lose. So instead, they want the Trump administration to concede that point.

That’s the 20,000-foot view of the current debate. You’ve probably heard some version of it, from one outlet or another. But the reality of what’s going on here is very different. And if you listen to Democrats talk long enough, they’ll explain what they’re really after. This is not, in fact, a shutdown that’s intended to “stop abuses by ICE”, whatever those abuses may be. The point of this shutdown is to terrorize Americans into another round of amnesty for the tens of millions of illegal aliens who currently reside in the United States.

Here’s Peter Welch, the senator for Vermont, making that point explicit.

Watch:

Source: @WesternLensman/X.com

If we were able to open up the rest of the government and focus on the ICE issue, it may allow us then to have, I think, a discussion that’s overdue. The border is secure now. … It’s ripe for us to have a sensible discussion about a reasonable immigration plan in a reasonable way, to deal with some folks who don’t have legal status.

That’s the part that Democrats, for the most part, haven’t been saying out loud. This isn’t actually about ICE at all. It’s about protecting the criminal foreign nationals they’ve allowed into this country, so that they — and their children — can vote for Democrats. It’s the same reason Democrats oppose the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship before someone can vote — which 85% of Americans support. The whole point of the shutdown is to lock in Democrat votes from illegal aliens. The Democrats’ leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, has also made this objective clear. Jeffries is one of the least intelligent members of Congress — he was chosen for the leadership role solely because of his skin color — so he’s not very good at keeping secrets. 

Watch:

Source: @WallStreetApes/X.com

Out of all of the 10,000 demands that Democrats have, strangely enough, Hakeem Jeffries is really keen on this one, very specific demand. He doesn’t choose to highlight his demand that ICE agents take off their masks, or that ICE agents obtain judicial warrants, or any of that. Instead, he makes it clear that he desperately wants ICE to stay very far away from *polling stations,* in particular. He says it several times. Why might that be? Who exactly would be intimidated by the presence of a federal immigration officer at a polling station? Who would choose to stay at home, in hiding, rather than get anywhere near an ICE agent?

Jeffries is simply too dumb to realize how transparent he’s being here. His overriding concern — and the concern of his party — is ensuring that tens of millions of illegal aliens can vote in the next election. That’s what the shutdown is about. None of these people cares about Alex Pretti or Renee Good or whatever. They’re not even hiding it anymore. The only rational conclusion you can draw is that illegal aliens are even more important to the Democratic Party than we realized. This is where a lot of their votes are coming from. And they’re willing to take down the airports in this country, and make your life worse in every way, in order to help these criminals cast a vote in the midterms.

Source: @brianglenntv/X.com

By the way, it’s not just TSA that’s been affected by this shutdown. While ICE and Customs and Border Protection have funding, many other agencies within DHS are impacted. Homeland Security Investigations (or HSI) is also defunded at the moment. They handle investigations into child sex trafficking and terrorism. The Secret Service, FEMA, and the Coast Guard are also impacted. In every sense, at a moment when we’re at war with Iran, Democrats aren’t simply making life less convenient. They’re also making life a lot more dangerous. We’ve had, what, four terror attacks in the past month? And guess what happens when you have a five-hour TSA line at every major airport? You create a large, obvious target for a mass shooter. When hundreds of people are lined up, like sitting ducks, for days on end, we’re inviting a terrorist attack. That’s what Democrats are doing, for the benefit of foreign invaders.

But if you ask Democrats, they won’t even mention this. Instead, they’ll claim that ICE agents — who the Trump administration is going to deploy to airports, to assist with operations during the shutdown — are actually murderous psychopaths who are going to mow down American citizens when they try to carry more than 3.4 ounces of liquid onto the plane.

Watch:

Source: @TPostMillennial/X.com

He repeats the lie that ICE agents are “untrained,” which isn’t true. But even if it were true, so what? How much training do these people think you need in order to fill in for a TSA agent, exactly? All you have to do is tell people to put their stuff in the bin. Pat them down if the machine tells you to. And if you see a gun on the X-Ray machine, make sure you grab the gun.

Actually, you don’t even need to do that. A few years ago, the Inspector General at DHS found that roughly 70 to 80% of weapons managed to get through TSA checkpoints. They sent undercover agents in, and only around a third of them were stopped. And that was considered an improvement, because in previous years, 90% of the guns got through the checkpoint.

So if you replaced every TSA agent with an “untrained”, random person off the street, you’d almost certainly get better results than we’re getting now. But Democrats, who have created a universe in which ICE agents randomly kill people for no reason all of the time, are intent on pushing that narrative. 

Here, for example, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut:

ICE agents at airports will only aggravate delays & lines — disrupting checks, interrogating travelers, dragging parents from children, detaining citizens, brutalizing families, shooting & even killing.

Again, if you read between the lines here, it’s not hard to see what they’re actually worried about. They know that, if ICE is manning the TSA stations, they’re very likely to come across illegal aliens. That’s especially true if the ICE agents are checking IDs. Tom Homan, the border czar, has suggested that’s going to happen. 

Watch:

Source: @EricLDaugh/X.com

Source: @EricLDaugh/X.com

What’s going on here, in case it’s not obvious, is that Democrats and the corporate press are convinced that they’re being far more subtle than they actually are. You simply cannot convince any American with a functioning brain that it would be difficult to replace all of those famously “highly trained” TSA agents. You can’t convince any sane person, with an IQ above room temperature, that we need a “plan” — developed over many days — before we can possibly replace the brilliance of the typical TSA employee. We’ve all been to airports, OK? We know how mind-numbingly simple their job is, and how poorly they do it. We know that these people are calling in sick right now so they can play Call of Duty. So the attempt at deceiving everyone is just laughable.

But again, there’s a point to it. At every turn, they want to protect illegals. They want to protect illegal aliens at the polling place. They want to protect illegal aliens at the airport when they have to show ID (which is probably fake or stolen). They want to protect illegals so that they can vote for Democrats in November. Period. And they do not care if they destroy your life in the process.

This is another area where Democrats don’t have their story straight.

Here was Hakeem Jeffries the other day, from that same CNN interview:

Source: WesternLensman/X.com

Democrats, according to Jeffries, would never dream of using the American people as “leverage” to enact their open-borders agenda. It would never even cross their mind, he says. But Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the number-two Democrat in the House, said something very different in an interview with Fox back in October.

Watch:

Source: @RapidResponse47/X.com

She says, “Of course there will be families that are going to suffer … but it is one of the few leverage times we have.”

It’s hard to think of a more on-the-nose way to summarize the objectives of the Democratic Party. And it’s coming directly from the Democratic Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives. Their goal is to terrorize you and your family so that you do what they want. It’s why they endorsed and funded the BLM riots in 2020. It’s also why they paid for Laken Riley’s killer to fly around the United States, after letting him into the country. It’s also why Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman was just gunned down in Chicago, allegedly by a Venezuelan national named Jose Medina-Medina.

Credit: DHS.

She was walking in a park by the waterfront with her friends on Thursday morning, and according to the authorities, Medina-Medina shot her in the head, completely unprovoked. The Biden administration caught him at the border in 2023, then immediately released him. Police arrested him for shoplifting from Macy’s that same year, but again, he was let out of jail. He never showed up to court.

This is why Democrats exist as a political party, at this point. If they actually wanted to improve the lives of American citizens, they’d be talking about abolishing TSA entirely right now. They’d point out that there are around 20 airports in this country with private security arrangements, including San Francisco International, and all of them are operating smoothly right now. They’d tell you that TSA operates like a gigantic scam, using taxpayer money to purchase extremely expensive body scanners that are sold by companies with high-level political connections. But Democrats don’t want to tell you any of that, because right now, the TSA is one of the most effective weapons in their arsenal. They’re using the TSA to disable American infrastructure in service of their open-borders agenda. 

That’s the same reason they don’t want to privatize Air Traffic Control. Late last night, there was a catastrophic collision on the runway of LaGuardia Airport involving a fire truck and a passenger plane.

Source: @Breaking911/X.com

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MARCH 23: An Air Canada Express plane sits on the tarmac after it collided with a fire truck on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport on March 23, 2026 in New York City. The plane had landed from a flight from Montreal. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

ATC isn’t affected by the current shutdown, but if you remember, just a few months ago, they were. Democrats have absolutely no problem leveraging these public agencies to terrorize the public. The only way to solve that problem is to privatize these agencies immediately.

What you need to understand is that, while TSA is the issue *right now*, they have no intention of stopping with TSA. At every opportunity, Democrats will sabotage (and endanger) your life if it means protecting illegal aliens. That’s their voter base. Their future as a political party depends on it. And everyone else — right now, the traveling public — is just collateral damage.

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