Security, immigration controls fray as impasse over Trump's wall stretches into its fourth week
WASHINGTON – As the government shutdown stretched toward a month, the security and immigration controls that President Donald Trump says he's fighting to improve are starting to fracture as a result of the impasse.
About 800,000 federal employees from nine shuttered federal agencies, many of them charged with border and national security, have been furloughed or are working without pay. Lines at some airports lengthened as Transportation Security Administration agents failed to show for work. More than four of five Coast Guard employees stand watch without pay.
Of the 60,000 employees at Customs and Border Patrol, nine of 10 must report to work, checking passports and manning pieces of the border wall that have already been built. But they're not being paid. Immigration courts, as of Tuesday, had postponed more than 40,000 hearings, including many of the deportation cases Trump is trying to speed up.
The impasse over Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion for a wall at the border and the Democrats’ refusal to fund it showed no sign of resolution in the longest shutdown. From the high seas and airport terminals to desert border crossings and immigration courtrooms, concerns about security and those responsible for maintaining it mounted.
Illegal border crossings have plummeted since 2006 because of increased manpower at agencies such as the Coast Guard, TSA and Border Patrol. Success could turn to crisis in weeks if the shutdown continues and pay for those personnel is withheld, said Robert Pape, political science professor and director of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats. His warning from more than 10 years ago that terrorists could infiltrate the border could come to pass.
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"We will go in reverse with the border security we have obtained since 2006 under Republican and Democratic administrations," Pape said.
Border security personnel may have to look for other jobs to feed and house their families. Credit cards would be maxed out. They might have to walk off their jobs.
"It’s going to happen all at once," Pape predicted, "tens of thousands of people."
Workers strained on the job and at home
More than 44,000 of the Coast Guard's 50,000 employees must work without pay. Crews continued their missions, including the detention of 66 migrants trying to illegally enter Puerto Rico, according to the service.
Adm. Karl Schultz, the Coast Guard commandant, posted a Facebook message Sunday urging employees to persevere despite the hardship.
“While our Coast Guard workforce is deployed, there are loved ones at home reviewing family finances, researching how to get support, and weighing childcare options – they are holding down the fort,” Schultz wrote. “Please know that we are doing everything we can to support and advocate for you while your loved one stands the watch. You have not, and will not, be forgotten.”
Terminal B at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston remained closed through Wednesday. There aren't enough blue-shirted TSA agents to staff it. Concourse G at Miami International Airport was closed throughout the weekend because there weren't enough TSA agents to man the security checkpoint there. In Atlanta on Jan. 2, a gun slipped through screening, although the TSA said the breach was not related to the shutdown. Elsewhere, airport managers urged passengers to allow for more time to pass through screening.
The strain is showing up at agents' homes.
"I talked to a waitress in Bangor this morning whose husband works for TSA," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, tweeted Tuesday. "They literally had to get a loan to pay their mortgage for this month. That's just wrong."
Although TSA officials acknowledged longer-than-normal lines at some airports, 97 percent of airline passengers passed through security screening in less than 15 minutes Tuesday, according to the agency. The national rate for unscheduled absences – calling in sick, for example – was 6.1 percent Tuesday compared with 3.7 percent on the same day a year ago.
Cairo D'Almeida, president of the union for TSA workers in Seattle, said Tuesday that his members turned to food banks and checked on eligibility for welfare. He encouraged them to report to work but said many will have to start looking for other jobs soon.
"Some of them won't have a choice," D'Almeida said.
Late Monday, the Pentagon announced that deployments of active-duty troops would continue at the southern border through September. There are about 2,300 active-duty troops at the border as part of the initial deployment Trump ordered in October to support Customs and Border Patrol agents.
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'Immigration court ... shut down over immigration'
In the lobby of the San Antonio Immigration Courts building, migrants from Central America and Mexico mingled, processing the news that their court cases were canceled because of the closed government. A notice taped next to the elevator said the third-floor courtrooms were closed until further notice and cases will be “reset for a further date after funding assumes.”
“If I had known this, I would have never left my house,” said Vianey Torres, 37, of Honduras, who traveled from Austin, Texas, for her second asylum hearing. A friend drove her three hours through heavy traffic to try to make the early morning hearing.
“I don’t have a car, I don’t drive, I don’t have a job,” Torres said. “Thankfully, I have friends.”
Trump’s demand for a border wall spurred an unforeseen side effect: More than 90 percent of cases in immigration court are indefinitely on hold, according to Ashley Tabaddor, one of the hundreds of furloughed immigration court judges and the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
“The irony is not lost on us that the immigration court is being shut down over immigration,” Tabaddor said, speaking in her role as president of the association.
The immigration court system was already suffering a historic backlog of cases before the government was shut down Dec. 22. There are more than 800,000 cases of immigrants trying to fight off deportation, win asylum or adjust their status, up from 542,000 two years ago, according to the TRAC Immigration Project at Syracuse University.
The average national wait time for a case to be heard is nearly two years, up from 10 months in 1998, according to TRAC.
The Justice Department, which oversees all immigration judges, decided that during the shutdown, it will handle immigration cases only if the defendant is detained – less than 10 percent of all cases. A quarter of the nation’s nearly 400 immigration judges continue to work, most of them in detention centers, while all other judges have been idled. Thousands of hearings a day are skipped. Under such a massive backlog, Tabaddor said, it could be years before those cases are rescheduled.
In San Antonio, which has some of the nation’s longest wait times, the shutdown is making a bad situation much worse, said Linda Brandmiller, an immigration attorney.
Brandmiller said the shutdown will further entangle an immigration court system that was already struggling under 26,000 backlog cases.
Jeremy McKinney, an immigration attorney in Greensboro, North Carolina, said the government shutdown complicated cases for his clients and made life incredibly difficult for immigrants facing hearings.
One by one, he’s watched as his clients’ long-awaited hearings have been canceled. They will probably be rescheduled for months or years down the road, meaning witnesses will disappear, evidence will grow stale and their ability to win asylum or adjust their status will diminish, McKinney said.
Because there is only one immigration court covering both the Carolinas, he said, immigrants travel hours to Charlotte only to find out that immigration court is closed.
“If you have someone living in Raleigh, North Carolina, that person is driving about three hours to get there,” he said. “If that person lives in Charleston, South Carolina, they’re driving four hours.”
Like Brandmiller, McKinney, treasurer of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said there’s an unexpected bright side to the shutdown: Immigrants facing deportation hearings are getting reprieves that may last for months or years.
“There are some people who are perfectly OK with this,” McKinney said. “I’m sure this administration is not thrilled to hear that, but the shutdown is actually providing a little breathing room for them.”