Border czar Tom Homan says ICE may stay at airports after shutdown

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Mar 30, 2026

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Border czar Tom Homan says Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents may stay at airport security checkpoints even after the partial government shutdown ends.

After President Donald Trump ordered Transportation Safety Administration airport screeners paid, Homan said ICE would remain deployed to checkpoints at several airports until things improve.

“We’re going to continue a nice presence there until the airports feel like they’re 100%, you know, in a posture where they can do no normal operations,” Homan said.

“We’ll be there as long as they need us, until they get back to normal operations and feel like those airports are secure,” he added.

After weeks of rising chaos at U.S. airports, TSA agents said they received their first paychecks in weeks on Monday. Wait times at some TSA security bottlenecks, such as the airport checkpoints in Atlanta and Houston, also improved significantly Monday.

LaGuardia’s Terminal B was still reporting up to 60-minute wait times by midday Monday, but terminals at John F. Kennedy and Newark international airports said lines were no more than 30 minutes. TSA PreCheck lines were less than 10 minutes at all three hubs.

But Congress appears no closer to resolving the dispute over funding the Department of Homeland Security, which has stretched on for six weeks.

Democratic Sen. Chris Coons was on the floor to make sure the GOP didn’t try to reverse the late-night measure that passed unanimously last week. That bill would have funded all of DHS except for ICE and Border Patrol, which are flush with cash anyway from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill passed last summer.

Fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives balked at the Senate bill and passed their own spending package that would also fund the agencies spearheading Trump’s immigration crackdown, even though the Senate has blocked identical bills several times.

It’s unclear what legal basis DHS is relying on to pay the TSA agents without congressional approval or why they couldn’t have paid them all along.

Tens of thousands of TSA employees, along with some Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency workers, had been working without pay since DHS funding lapsed Feb. 14.

Democrats agreed to fund the rest of the government in hopes of negotiating guardrails on the immigration crackdown, like agents identifying themselves and submitting to independent investigations of alleged wrongdoing, especially the January killings of two U.S. citizen protesters in Minneapolis.

But those talks collapsed, triggering the partial shutdown.

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