EXCLUSIVE: Why the Long TSA Lines? New Mobile Billboards at These Airports Aim to Explain
Virginia Allen /
Mobile billboards are being deployed Tuesday morning at the three Washington, D.C.-area airports amid the Department of Homeland Security shutdown that has led to long security lines at airports across the nation.
“You’re waiting in line because millions skipped it. Tell Chuck Schumer: Fund DHS,” the billboard reads, referring to the millions of illegal aliens that Customs and Border Protection reports entered the United States during the Biden administration. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is the Senate Minority Leader.
The billboard includes a number and a QR code to call Schumer’s office.
Republicans and Democrats failed to reach an agreement on DHS funding last month, sending the department into a partial shutdown starting Feb. 14. Many DHS employees, including Transportation Security Administration workers, are not being paid during the shutdown.
The placement of the mobile billboards is strategic because many senators will be using D.C.-area airports at the end of the week to fly home for a two-week recess over the Easter and Passover holidays.
Democrats have demanded reforms to immigration enforcement policies, such as requiring federal immigration officers not to wear masks during enforcement operations, to be part of a deal to fund DHS. However, Republicans have refused to accept the demands.
“Democrats are willing to take the airlines hostage if it means showing their radical base they’re fighting on behalf of illegal aliens,” said Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, the group funding the billboards.
“Unfortunately, it looks like that tactic has spooked some Republicans,” Howell continued. “We’re doing this on behalf of the majority of Americans who want to see immigration law enforced with mass deportation.”
A deal is reportedly on the table that Trump is considering backing, and which could gain bipartisan support in Congress to fund DHS. The deal would fund the agency, but only part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, excluding funding for the enforcement and removal operation arm of ICE.
“Under the Biden administration, millions of illegal aliens flooded across our borders, including record numbers of national security threats and dangerous criminals. Now, congressional Democrats are fighting to return us to the same failed policies that shielded those illegal aliens and allowed them to settle in communities around the country,” Joe Chatham, director of government relations at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said.
“Americans deserve to have our laws enforced and DHS fully funded, not held hostage to radical demands aimed at undermining immigration enforcement,” Chatham added.
ICE is currently funded through the Trump-backed Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed last summer, but immigration enforcement supporters have expressed concern over separating ICE funding from a DHS funding bill for fear of additional hurdles to fund ICE’s work in the future.
The majority of Americans support the deportation of illegal aliens, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. The poll found that 61% of respondents said they “support deporting unauthorized immigrants.”
“Young Americans have been generationally burdened through unaffordable housing, costly public services, pay depreciation in blue-collar jobs, and crime in the communities we live in. The old corporate-friendly approach to immigration doesn’t solve these issues,” Gabe Guidarini, chairman of the Ohio College Republican Federation, said. “Only mass deportations will substantively improve the quality of life for my peers.”