The President sends ICE agents to American airports to plug a TSA staffing crisis.

OK. Pull up a stool. Sunday afternoon. The President of the United States, in the White House briefing room, announces that, beginning Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, the agents whose normal day job is arresting undocumented immigrants, will be deployed to major United States airports.

Hon. Pause. ICE. At the airport. In the terminal. Checking your boarding pass.

The reason, hon, on the official statement, is that the Department of Homeland Security shutdown is now in week six. The TSA, which is part of DHS, has not been paid since February 14. Sixty-one thousand TSA officers have been working without paychecks for five weeks. On Friday, three thousand five hundred and sixty of them called out sick. That is, hon, twelve point three percent of the entire national TSA workforce in a single day. The call-out rate, on the previous Friday, was under three percent. The call-out rate, hon, is the staff telling you what they think of not getting paid for five weeks.

The administration, hon, has several options to address the staffing crisis. Option one: fund DHS. Option two: pay the TSA workers in arrears. Option three: call up the National Guard, which has the authority and training to handle airport security. Option four: deploy ICE.

The administration, hon, picked option four.

ICE, hon, has no airport-security training. ICE is not the agency that runs the magnetometer. ICE is not the agency that operates the X-ray. ICE is not the agency that handles the explosive-detection canines. ICE is the agency that arrests people. That is the job. That is the title. Immigration. And. Customs. Enforcement. It is in the name of the agency.

The Press Secretary, on Sunday afternoon, said the ICE agents will not be performing arrests at the checkpoint. The Press Secretary said the ICE agents will be handling ID checks and monitoring exit lanes. That is, hon, a real assignment. That is not a fake one. That assignment is, however, the assignment that TSA officers are trained for, certified for, and paid by the federal government to do. The administration, on Sunday, decided to pay ICE to do the TSA’s job rather than pay the TSA to do the TSA’s job.

Same Sunday afternoon, hon, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, the adviser to the President on the unfortunate doings of the previous year, announced on his social media platform that he would offer to pay the salaries of the TSA workers. I am not making this up. The richest man in the world is offering to personally pay the salaries of sixty-one thousand federal employees because the Congress controlled by his political allies is not paying them.

Hon. That is not how government works. That is not how funding works. That is not how anything works. The richest man in the world paying the TSA would, if it actually happened, create an immediate constitutional crisis about who the TSA reports to. The TSA reports to Congress. Congress funds the TSA. The TSA does not work for Elon Musk. The offer, hon, is the kind of offer a guy makes when he wants the headline, not when he wants to fix the problem. The headline, he got. The fix, he did not attempt.

The Democratic House Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, on Sunday afternoon, said the deployment of ICE risks repeating actions that already cost lives, a reference, hon, to the Minneapolis raids in January in which ICE officers shot dead two American citizens. He is not wrong. He is, on the facts, correct.

You ever notice how the people who say they are fixing the immigration system keep deploying the immigration agency to do every other job in the federal government?

Funny how that works.