I’m one of the lucky ones. I flew twice in the last four days without long lines, departing from PHL and RSW. In both cases this site – tsawaittimes.com – accurately predicted my TSA wait time, which was negligible. (For the locals… when I flew out of PHL the C checkpoint was already closed, and now A-West and F checkpoints are closed, too.) Here’s an outbound PHL traveler tip for when the dust settles: the TSA PreCheck lane at A-West is always my go-to, even if I’m flying out of B or C. Most importantly, this is such a sad sign of our government dysfunction and deeply unfair to TSA agents who perform a vital task in a dank environment and not for a lot of money. They missed their first paychecks last week and there has been widespread reporting on the economic strain they are facing. My former intern, “Erik X”, had a brilliant idea: there should be collection buckets next to every TSA luggage screening belt so passengers could drop a Fiver. Tips for TSA. Agents would see a bump in their pay, it would be in cash, and literally no one would call in sick! At this point, does anyone even remember that this dispute isn’t even about DHS and TSA, it’s about another acronym… ICE?
Remember how we got here. Federal agents killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on January 7th and 24th, respectively. Attention to those tragedies, and ICE more broadly, coincided with an impending government shutdown that was narrowly averted when budgets were approved for all agencies except DHS. That carveout was meant to allow the White House and congressional negotiators to resolve disagreements on ICE-related issues including masks, body cameras, and “roving” patrols. I’m not minimizing the Good and Pretti killings, but the news cycle has moved on after ICE took a step back in Minneapolis, Greg Bovino retired and war came to Iran. Yesterday President Trump took to Truth Social to say that Democrats will “pay a big price” in the midterms as a result of the shutdown. I don’t think voters are blaming one party more than another, I think it’s just this week’s Rorschach test.
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