Across the U.S., families have been making plans for months: Pricing flights and looking for the right hotel rooms. Eating out less they can afford a nice meal in an Orlando-area restaurant. Figuring out how many theme parks they visit, making sure all the kids have walking shoes that fit, arranging to board the dogs and trying to find the best deals on mouse ears.
For a family of four, the average cost of a trip to Orlando during spring break starts at around $5,000. Some have been saving for years, considering it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. These families are legion: in 2026, auto club AAA ranked Orlando the No. 1 spring break destination, and the love goes both ways: the spring break season is usually the Orlando market’s busiest time.
Orlando is special, but it’s hardly alone. Across the country, spring break is a boon to leisure and business travel.
And that makes it the absolute worst time to stop paying the officers and screeners who are crucial in moving those passengers through airports and safely onto their flights.
Yet that’s the situation. Tuesday, multiple media outlets reported that about 2,700 workers for the Transportation Security Administration called out, a national average of about 10%. That’s no surprise. As a weeks-long budget standoff in Congress dragged on, the Department of Homeland Security stopped paying TSA agents, who saw their first $0 paychecks last week. As a result, TSA lines can be excruciatingly slow — an hour or more in some of the airports that Orlando relies on to send steady streams of visitors.
As spring break kicks into high gear, the federal government is reportedly considering closures of smaller airports. Hundreds of flights were canceled on Tuesday alone (a number exacerbated by bad weather.). Tens of thousands of passengers saw flight delays. Some of them are missing connecting flights, leaving them sitting in a strange airport instead of a poolside at a resort. And as the shutdown wears on and disrupted passengers struggle to re-book their flights, the damage will snowball.
The stalemate stems from Democrats’ insistence on immigration-enforcement reform — particularly, the cruel and often erroneous enforcement that is sending shockwaves of fear throughout immigrant populations and even distressing American-citizen residents of Puerto Rico. It’s not hard to see why some lawmakers are disgusted: While President Trump initially said he’d only catch criminals in his immigration dragnet, the number of people who have been detained without any criminal history or pending charges continues to grow, and now outnumbers the group of those with past charges or immigrants who are currently facing criminal charges.\\
Congressional Republicans have consistently refused a deal that would fund the TSA and other Homeland Security offices while withholding money from ICE. They’ve heard the stories of people being unlawfully detained, including some American citizens. They’ve watched families ripped apart, with one or both parents detained prior to deportation. They’ve seen protections stripped from people who fled for their lives to this country, and are now facing removal even though they’ve never broken a single law.
Yet GOP leaders have remained unmoved — and utterly disinterested in reforms.\But who knows? Maybe the wails and crushed dreams of American travelers will finally melt their hearts.
There’s a simple solution: Pay the men and women who are in place to make travel safer. Get the planes in the sky and people on their way to the vacations they need so badly. And stop holding tourism hostage in an ill-conceived attempt to protect ICE, which has clearly lost its way.
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Krys Fluker, Executive Editor Roger Simmons and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. Use insight@orlandosentinel.com to contact us.