Trump Private Army…ICE….

When President Trump wanted to do something about the long lines at U.S. airports on Monday, he turned to one of his favorite tools: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mr. Trump said he personally ordered that ICE agents be sent to manage crowds, amid a funding standoff that has led airport security workers to miss pay and not report to work. Unable to push congressional Democrats to approve funding for the Homeland Security Department without giving in on some immigration policies, he said ICE was an obvious choice to address the fallout.

“ICE,” he told reporters Monday, “was my idea.”

Mr. Trump has increasingly used ICE to try to achieve personal and political objectives, deploying a force with a quasi-military bearing around the country with a message that he intends to not just carry out his anti-immigration agenda but to also enforce his views on constituencies and states that have opposed him.

Last year, he sent officers into large Democratic-run cities as part of a highly visible immigration enforcement operation. He rushed teams to Minneapolis to pursue Somali immigrants accused of fraud in viral videos. Now, he is pushing agents to airports to help the Transportation Security Administration and pressure Democrats into folding in the weekslong shutdown fight….

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The deployment of ICE agents to airports also seemed to be a nod to another point: that the agency’s increasingly intimidating reputation has some upsides for the administration. In his initial announcement about the mobilization, Mr. Trump said ICE officers would also be on hand to arrest unauthorized immigrants at airports, raising the specter of people being asked to show their citizenship papers or handcuffed amid the spring break travel rush…

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Some former ICE officials say Mr. Trump is doing harm to an organization that has struggled with its reputation and needs to maintain some independence from the president’s will.

“President Trump cannot help himself and is using ICE as a political battering ram,” said Deborah Fleischaker, a former senior ICE official in the Biden administration. “ICE has an important public safety mission. It would be nice if the administration actually allowed them to do it — humanely, fairly and in compliance with the law and U.S. Constitution.”

Mr. Trump has been open about his view that ICE can help him with goals that go far beyond immigration enforcement. In a June directive to ICE officers on social media, he indicated that aiming his mass deportation campaign at Democratic-led cities could help Republicans electorally….

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Darius Reeves, a former head of the ICE office in Baltimore, said that if the administration wanted to get T.S.A. staff members more help, it could have used agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection who are already in the airport doing security checks and passport verifications. That, he said, would have been a less politically charged decision.

Instead, he said, ICE is being used as a “political tool” to get back at Democrats. He described the agency as having “low morale” as a result of the continued controversies around its actions.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” he said. “We will become the most hated federal law enforcement agency — we will surpass the I.R.S.”….

More…

Note…

ICE will be getting new overall boss…

Will he ask HIS boss, Trump, to give his troops a break from being knocked by airport travellers?

Will ICE be allowed to just go back to looking good for JUST criminal migrants?

image…LiveNOW from Fox