ICE at airports: Trump’s troll move backfires

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have been deployed by the Trump administration to airports around the country, and the idea appears to have started during call-in segments on right-wing radio shows.

This is no exaggeration.

Journalists Ben Smith of Semafor and Brian Stelter of CNN traced the ICE-in-airports idea to “Linda from Arizona,” who called into a D-list conservative radio show hosted by Clay Travis and Buck Sexton on March 20. Both Linda and the hosts were blunt that the goal was not actually helping the Transportation Security Administration run more efficient checkpoints but to trigger the liberals.

“I think it would set their hair on fire,” Linda said, full of glee at the idea.

“Democrats would go absolutely insane,” agreed one of the hosts.

It’s unclear why Linda and Clay-and-Buck thought that annoying Democrats would pressure or persuade them to drop their opposition to funding the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE operations. DHS has been shut down since Feb. 14, when the GOP refused to meet Democrats’ demands for significant reforms following the fatal shootings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents. Although Linda and Clay-and-Buck did try to argue that ICE agents would help TSA with security, their proposal makes little sense in practice. Shorter lines would actually relieve pressure to get a funding deal done by taking away a major pain point.

Liberals hate ICE, the logic went, so why not inflict ICE on liberals and make them squeal? But the MAGA coalition has not been known for its logic, and it’s clear from the conversation that no one involved was really thinking this through. Instead, the scheme was rooted in a childish — and sadistic — impulse to bully.

Donald Trump often seems composed of little more than sadistic impulses, and he has only gotten angrier with age. After the idea percolated up from Linda to Clay-and-Buck and then to Fox News, Trump thought it was a stroke of genius. Since he couldn’t admit that he got the idea from a random woman in Green Valley, Arizona, he took credit for it on Monday, comparing himself to the man who invented the paperclip in the process.

What is remarkable is that everyone involved — all of them, from Linda to Trump himself — are so consumed with the desire to trigger the liberals that no one stopped to wonder if the plan to put ICE in airports would backfire, as it appears to be doing.

Early reports show ICE is doing nothing to speed up security lines, many of which have hours-long waits due to Republicans’ refusal to pass a Democratic proposal to fund the TSA directly while still withholding DHS funding. The presence of ICE is instead ratcheting up tensions at the already stress-laden airports. Federal immigration officers can’t do the real work of screening passengers, but they can harass and manhandle people suspected of being immigrants.

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Despite credulous media reports perpetuating the belief that ICE has been deployed to help TSA agents, every indication is that Trump’s goal is to make already-miserable traveling experiences even worse. His posts on Truth Social are obviously threats, not offers of help. “‘GET READY.’ NO MORE WAITING, NO MORE GAMES!” read one. Another said, “If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country,” the president would “look forward to seeing ICE in action at our Airports.”

There was little mention of faster lines, but lots of joy at imagining people, especially those perceived to be immigrants, suffering from this.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, went so far to suggest on Monday’s episode of his “War Room” podcast that the president’s deployment of immigration agents is a “test case to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.” Whatever hand-waving Bannon might do to deny the implication — that ICE would intimidate voters into casting their ballots for Republicans or, more likely, staying away from the polls altogether — it’s clear to both his audience and critics. The goal is not to make life easier for anyone, but to make everyday actions like voting or traveling a terrible, if not terrifying, idea.

The message seems to be that if Democrats don’t immediately cave to the GOP, Trump will make airline travel even more miserable for everyone. For all his persona as a businessman, the president has never been a talented negotiator. He has failed time and again in his belief that inflicting widespread pain on communities — from Minneapolis to Iran — will automatically result in immediate compliance from his opponents. No matter how often his actions only cause people to fight back even harder, Trump’s evident love of making other people suffer overrules the empirical evidence that it just does not work.

It’s especially silly in this case, because it’s not like the only people whose travel plans are being ruined are Democratic voters. Trump is inflicting harm on plenty of his own voters, and at a time when he’s already losing support from large chunks of the electorate that took a chance on him in 2024. Republicans are already expecting heavy losses in November’s midterm elections, and having a president who is actively making air travel hellish will likely only make it worse. This seems obvious, and yet Trump seems pleased with Linda’s whole “make airports suck for everyone” plan.

The “everyone” aspect of airports is likely part of the psychological dynamic here. For MAGA voters hostile to American diversity, there are all sorts of tricks for cordoning themselves off so they can minimize exposure to people who don’t look and talk exactly like them. But even for those who live in the whitest of suburbs, if they have to travel, that means going to an airport, usually in a city, where they get a full eyeball of the broad spectrum of people that constitute how Americans actually look: people of different races and ethnicities, queer people and the purple-haired feminists much discussed but rarely spotted in person in MAGA-land.

(I may be a middle-aged white lady, but being a tattooed hipster flavor means that even I get a taste of how some conservatives loathe having to be among the hoi polloi when I’m at the airport in certain parts of the country. Last time I was in Midland, Texas, I passed the time waiting for my flight by counting the number of dirty looks I got from conservative-looking white people in the lobby. As I nursed my Starbucks and played games on my iPhone, I felt like a real antifa super solider.)

It must also be noted that TSA is incredibly diverse as an agency. Over half of agents are racial minorities, and 41% are women. ICE, on the other hand, has been overt in marketing itself as a very white, very male agency. The image then, is of Trump sending a bunch of thuggish white men to lord over working-class women and people of color that make up the ranks of TSA screeners.

This is not a fantasy of ICE offering help to overworked TSA agents who are not being paid due to the shutdown. It’s an idea made manifest: ICE as a punishment the Trump administration can inflict on classes of people whose claims to equality anger them.

But it’s also a symptom of how Trump is alienating large swaths of Americans that had been, during the 2024 election, persuaded that he isn’t as bad as the liberals were saying. Hard as it may be to believe, a lot of Trump voters in 2024 weren’t fanatical red-hats. They were people who don’t follow politics closely and were easily duped by claims that liberals who warned Trump is a fascist were merely hysterical.

The president has already seen his approval numbers plummet with those voters, especially young men and Latinos. Siccing a bunch of ICE agents on airports for the obvious purpose of making an already-fraught situation worse may be fun for Trump and his most fanatically right-wing followers. For everyone else, it’s further proof that the so-called hysterical liberals were in fact right all along.