Trump Threatens to Send ICE to Airports Monday Amid Shutdown Standoff

(UNITED STATES) — President Donald Trump said on March 21, 2026, that he will move Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to U.S. airports starting Monday if Democrats do not agree to a funding package to end the Department of Homeland Security partial shutdown.

Trump made the threat in posts on Truth Social as the shutdown entered its 36th day, turning a budget standoff over DHS appropriations into a direct warning about airport operations during a busy travel period.

“If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country … be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports,” Trump wrote, adding that ICE would handle security “like no one has ever seen before,” including the “immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country.”

He added: “I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday, and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!”

The partial shutdown has stretched across multiple DHS agencies since mid-February 2026, with funding negotiations still deadlocked. Lawmakers remain divided not only over keeping the department open, but also over whether new money should come with changes to immigration enforcement.

That dispute has already reached travelers. About 50,000 TSA officers are working without pay, and staffing shortages have contributed to visible strain at airports across the country.

Security lines have stretched for hours at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental, Atlanta, and New York’s LaGuardia. At LaGuardia, lines snaked into parking lots amid spring break travel surges.

Absenteeism has climbed as the shutdown wears on. Callout rates have more than doubled, adding pressure to a workforce that continues reporting for duty without a paycheck.

For many TSA workers, the financial strain has become personal and immediate. Workers have reported depleting life savings, seeking second jobs, or quitting.

Trump’s posts framed the airport deployment as a contingency tied to the funding impasse. His stated rationale mixed airport security with immigration enforcement, presenting ICE officers as a backstop if lawmakers fail to reach an agreement.

That stance widened the shutdown’s effect beyond a budget fight in Washington. It also raised the prospect that airport staffing and enforcement duties could shift in the middle of a prolonged federal funding lapse.

At the Capitol, the legislative fight remains centered on immigration policy. Democrats blocked DHS funding legislation for the fifth time on Friday, pressing for changes affecting ICE and Customs and Border Protection before they would support broader funding.

Those demands include body cameras on ICE agents, restrictions on arrests in sensitive locations like churches, and requirements for judicial warrants before home entries. Republicans have rejected those conditions and continue to push funding for all DHS agencies, including TSA, the Coast Guard, and FEMA, without policy limits attached.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called for immediate relief for TSA workers without tying that funding to the wider immigration dispute.

“It is unacceptable for workers and travelers and entire airports to get taken hostage in political games, but that’s what the Republicans are doing,” Schumer said on the Senate floor.

He added: “It is unacceptable to say we will only pay TSA workers if it is attached to a bill that funds ICE with no reforms. Democrats want to pay TSA workers ASAP, with no strings attached.”

Schumer also said “productive conversations on reforming ICE and CBP” are ongoing. His position drew a line between paying airport security workers now and continuing negotiations over enforcement rules later.

Republicans showed no sign of yielding on Saturday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Democrats should stop resisting the funding terms already on the table.

“At some point, the Democrats are going to have to take yes for an answer. I know they think this is politically good for them. It is not,” Thune said at a press conference.

Thune also described recent closed-door meetings with White House border czar Tom Homan as “productive.” He said the administration had submitted updated legislative text on DHS funding.

That left both sides publicly arguing they wanted the shutdown to end while backing sharply different paths to get there. Democrats want changes to how ICE and CBP operate. Republicans want a clean funding measure that keeps all DHS agencies running.

Homan, speaking after a late Friday meeting with bipartisan lawmakers, linked the immediate funding question to continued talks. “We need to get the government open and we’ll keep talking until it has,” he told reporters.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy added to the administration’s pressure campaign in television remarks aimed at the shutdown’s effect on travelers.

“I just wish they would stop using the American people as leverage. Make them go through pain so Democrats can get what they want legislatively,” Duffy said on Fox News.

The airport strain has given that message a visible edge. Long lines, unpaid officers and mounting frustration among travelers have turned the shutdown into a daily operational problem, not only a political one.

Any move to bring ICE into airports would come as the agency’s flight operations have already expanded sharply. February 2026 saw a surge in ICE Air activity, reflecting a broader rise in enforcement and detention transfers.

Those flights fall into more than one category. Removal flights transport people out of the United States, while domestic transfer flights — often called “shuffle” flights — move detainees between detention facilities inside the country.

In February, ICE Air carried out 1,630 enforcement flights, a 155% increase from February 2025. That total included 183 removal flights to 31 countries and a record 1,170 domestic “shuffle” flights averaging 42 per day between detention centers.

The domestic transfers illustrate how much of ICE’s air network operates away from public view. Rather than removing people from the country, many flights move them from one detention site to another, often across large distances inside the United States.

A new subcontractor, Bighorn Airways, operated 173 such flights in February. The company used 37-40 seat planes with shackled passengers.

Those details have added to concern among immigration advocates, who say the buildup in flights has human consequences far from airport checkpoints. Witness accounts tied to recent operations describe family separation, harsh treatment in transit and the dislocation caused by repeated transfers through detention facilities.

Savi Arvey, director of Research and Analysis for Refugee and Immigrant Rights at Human Rights First, said deportees she encountered in Guatemala City described abuse on ICE flights, leaving U.S. citizen children behind and being treated “like animals.”

Her account connected the current shutdown debate to a wider argument over how immigration enforcement should operate even when DHS is fully funded. The same issues Democrats are trying to address in the appropriations fight — oversight, conduct and limits on enforcement — sit at the center of those concerns.

For Republicans and Trump administration allies, the shutdown has become an argument for fewer conditions on DHS funding. They have cast Democratic demands as the obstacle keeping airport workers unpaid and passengers stuck in long lines.

For Democrats, the same standoff has become an attempt to force changes to agencies that handle arrests, detention and border enforcement. Their position reflects a calculation that reopening DHS without reforms would leave ICE and CBP with more money but no new restraints.

That split has hardened as the shutdown drags on. Each side is now pairing its funding message with a public campaign: Republicans emphasizing airports, staffing and travel disruption, Democrats emphasizing oversight and limits on enforcement power.

Trump’s Saturday threat sharpened that divide. By tying ICE directly to airports and giving Monday as a deadline, he added a new layer of pressure to negotiations that had already stalled after five blocked attempts to pass DHS funding legislation.

The practical effect remained linked to whether a deal emerges before then. But even without a shift in personnel, the shutdown is already reshaping daily life in the nation’s airports through unpaid TSA work, rising absenteeism and lines that stretch far past security checkpoints.

Behind that immediate strain lies a broader expansion of ICE activity in the air. Removal flights continue sending people to countries outside the United States, while shuffle flights keep moving detainees between detention centers at a record pace.

That mix of airport disruption and stepped-up enforcement has pulled two separate systems into the same fight. As lawmakers battle over how to fund DHS, travelers wait in longer lines, TSA officers work without pay, and ICE’s growing flight network carries shackled passengers through a detention system that critics say is already under mounting pressure.

Trump’s message made clear how he intends to use that moment. “I look forward to moving ICE in on Monday,” he wrote, “and have already told them to, ‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!”