Putting ICE on thin ice

It was either of two things: a presidential weapon deployed with reckless abandon, or a wily political stunt that was surprisingly brilliant. Either way, it has put ICE on thin ice.

Last week, and on account of the widespread travel delays impacting major US airports due to the shortage of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners, the Trump White House deployed armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to select airports across the country to help resolve the issue.

Coming on the heels of a congressional impasse over the subject of federal funding for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), critics wasted no time pouncing on the move as an unconstitutional exercise of executive power.

ICE agents, according to critics, are not trained to detect airport security threats. Neither are they adept at airline passenger screening. Indeed, their expertise involves investigating, apprehending, and removing people who run afoul of immigration laws, not searching for and seizing oversized liquid containers or hidden explosives from passengers’ carry-on bags.

While every law enforcement officer possesses the innate authority to arrest any person in the act of committing a crime (or during the immediate pursuit thereof), the rapid deployment of hundreds of ICE agents to airports nationwide cannot be justified on this basis alone since very rarely do serious criminal transgressions occur, if at all, inside passenger terminals.

From the DHS standpoint, however, the ICE deployment was perfectly legal as agents could and were in fact providing complementary support to the TSA’s core functions, such as “guarding entrances and exits, assisting with logistics, doing crowd control, and verifying identification using TSA equipment and standard operating procedures.”

In other words, ICE agents were being deployed to perform some of TSA’s most elementary functions, including one that could sow fear in the hearts of people with questionable immigration status: checking passengers’ IDs.

Indeed, any immigration violator traveling domestically by air runs the risk of being discovered and/or apprehended if, by a stroke of bad luck, said person encounters an overly aggressive ICE agent who asks to see an immigration ID instead of the required in-country identification, such as a REAL ID-compliant driver’s license or a valid passport.

Interestingly, while TSA inspectors do not possess the authority to ask for a passenger’s immigration ID, ICE agents do, and this is where things can get really nasty and leave ICE grappling on thin ice.

If ICE agents start asking for immigration IDs at airports, which will not only inconvenience but also rattle the nerves of non-Caucasian travelers, it will further erode the public’s trust in the agency, which is already hovering at historic lows.

In fact, even if America’s travel crisis is ultimately resolved due to ICE’s intervention-–a plausible scenario that could score political points for the White House-–the majority of travelers will continue to choose the TSA’s less intrusive screening method over ICE’s heavy-handed, Gestapo-like version.

Ironically, however, and considering the ICE deployment’s enervative impact on passengers’ comfort level, it’s fair to assume that it’s not only ICE that will be forced to tread on thin ice but the traveling public as well.

Perhaps even more dangerously so.