Democrats Hold Air Travelers Hostage By Keeping DHS Unfunded

Senate Democrats have given the world a sneak preview of how they will manage the government if they return to power by effectively shuttering Homeland Security of all mission-critical operations because of a policy disagreement over how ICE, which is housed under the agency, handles deportations of illegal aliens.

The strategy to obstruct DHS operations has become a microcosm for Democratic leadership: at one and the same time, malevolent and incompetent.

Its malevolence is exhibited in the fact that deportations operations are being used as the putative basis for suspending funding indefinitely for the agency.

Its incompetence is on full display in the fact that ICE, the one agency that DHS Democrats hate the most, remains funded and active due to the One Big Beautiful Bill, which allocated hundreds of millions in funds to the subagency separate and apart of the yearly appropriations bills.

The policy of strict immigration enforcement, which has overwhelming and indeed, even bi-partisan support among broad swaths of the electorate, was a core part of President Trump’s re-election campaign.

The Biden years demonstrated the utter destructiveness of a runaway, open-borders immigration policy – which had the effect of unleashing tens of millions into the interior, including dangerous criminal organizations, which have been directly or indirectly responsible for claiming the lives of millions of Americans.

The fentanyl epidemic is directly linked to Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s reckless open borders policies, which used demonizing rhetoric against anyone who asserted that national sovereignty and the protection of American interests is virtuous for the health, safety, and welfare of the nation.

As a result of that culture of admonishment, which Obama dressed up in flowery rhetoric, suffused in self-righteous indignation, America’s southern border was opened to the world.

Naturally, who entered from that policy were the most pernicious drug traffickers, gangbangers, and terrorist sleeper cells – which infiltrated the country by the millions, destabilizing the rule of law and eroding public trust in the process.

Quality of life in America, measured in real terms, from wages to public infrastructure to institutional safety and trust, only worsened appreciably.

Our elections became discredited because there was no way to check who wound up on voter rolls, and indeed, who exercised the franchise – a problem that got worse and worse with each passing election.

Tens of millions of unaccountable non-citizens springing up in communities across the nation made a near-impossible challenge for authorities to keep track – leaving an outsized burden on local municipalities that were already ill-equipped to manage the headcount.

And this was all by design: a feature not a bug of a policy that was intentionally driven to make Democrats the supermajority party in power, bolstered for all time by a virtually limitless supply of alien newcomers.

When the President ran on a policy of closed borders and mass deportations, first in 2016 and then again with a vengeance in response to the Biden catastrophe in 2024, it sent shockwaves across the political establishment, sending Washington into a collective tailspin.

Harvesting dollars and votes through illegal aliens was – aside from waging wars – one of the biggest for-profit businesses in the nation’s capital and had been for decades.

That a President had ascended to power on a platform directly opposed to this prerogative was, in their eyes, unforgivable.

However, because the policy – and administration that ran on it – enjoyed unprecedented momentum, the Democrats were forced underground, resorting to extra-political means, like the power of the purse, to backchannel their disfavoritism towards a policy their fellow countrymen by and large supported.

And so, we arrive at the current predicament, the chaos at airports nationwide spawned by a Congress unwilling to pledge funding to an agency whose most critical task is the fulfillment of the President’s immigration enforcement policy.

The Democrats have in their hubris and arrogance waged war directly on the American people.  The policy of not funding DHS harms the agents of TSA, who must endure weeks without reliable pay.

This has led many of them to stop showing up to work entirely, or outright resigning, despite having a requirement by law to do so given the essential nature of their tasks, because of the demoralization campaign by the Democrats.  Those to whom they serve, travelers and airports, are then made less safe.

But overburdened workers, contending with a significantly reduced workforce and deferred payment, must continue their jobs anyway.  This has caused lengthy lines at airport checks, sometimes contributing to hours-long delays in major transportation hubs, exacerbating a broader crisis of missed flights, cancellations, and stressful experiences.

The policy is reminiscent of the Democrats’ sadistic treatment of ordinary Americans during the covid pandemic.

Even among TSA civil servants, which are a core voting bloc for the Democratic Party being government workers after all, they are subjected to harsh and inhumane treatment.

Though on the surface ostensibly counterintuitive, upon deeper inspection it makes a good deal of sense.

As we so easily recall, the Democrats, whenever put in charge of government operations, allow their incompetence to inflict maximum harm upon the population overall.

It does not matter how terrible the repercussions of their policies are, prudence always and everywhere takes a backseat to ideological rigidity.  Better to crash an economy or sink a nation than face public humiliation by admitting one’s mistake.

To make matters worse, airlines themselves are struggling with the Iranian conflict overseas.

Already oil is topping $100 a barrel, with some major airlines forecasting that oil prices could reach as high as $175 per barrel soon.

This has impacted all travel, both foreign and domestic.  And with no clear path towards re-opening the Strait of Hormuz in sight, the larger war effort figures to compound preexisting domestic challenges, especially if the war proves to be longer-lasting than once prognosticated.

Even though Homeland Security may have a new Secretary as early as Monday evening, with Senator Markwayne Mullin scheduled for an imminent floor vote, the ongoing dilemma of DHS only being partially funded will persist.

Even with a resolution to the short-term funding problem, however, the deeper problem of one of America’s two main political parties being in active rebellion against what is arguably the second most important executive branch agency is unsolved – portending bleak implications for the long-term safety of the nation.

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