closed three of its six security checkpoints<\/a> last week, amid a sharp rise in call-outs and resignations from Transportation Security Administration officers nationwide. They have gone weeks without a paycheck due to a federal funding impasse.\u00a0<\/p>\nA PHL spokesperson referred questions to the TSA and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.<\/p>\n
DHS, in a social media post Monday morning, said the Trump administration \u201cis taking action to deploy hundreds of ICE officers to airports adversely impacted\u201d by the security staffing crunch. Trump told reporters that he would send in the National Guard, if necessary, to support airport operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing members of the TSA, said U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents do not have the proper training to replace airport officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore than 50,000 TSA employees have worked without pay for over five weeks,\u201d Kelley said in a statement Sunday. \u201cHundreds have quit. And Washington\u2019s answer isn\u2019t to pay them. It\u2019s to send ICE agents to do their jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cCongress has the power to fund TSA today. It\u2019s time for them to stop playing politics and do their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Funding to pay TSA workers lapsed in February after Democratic lawmakers insisted on incorporating immigration enforcement reforms into any DHS spending legislation, following the January killings of Alex Pretti and Ren\u00e9e Good in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jack Tomczuk President Donald Trump\u2019s administration is deploying federal immigration officers to Philadelphia International Airport and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[2443,69,23913,71,70,13305],"class_list":["post-146145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-ice","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-airport","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-tsa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}