By Nick Valencia | March 24, 2026
LOS ANGELES— I was recording a video at the Atlanta airport, talking about how smooth everything had gone when I rounded the corner and saw them.
It was just before 5 a.m. when I got there. Early, but not unusually so for a 7:30a flight. The kind of hour where the airport feels half-asleep, where you expect delays, lines, friction. Instead, I got the opposite.
A Clear and TSA agent worked together, moving people through with urgency and clarity. No chaos. No confusion. It helped us all. I made it through security in about an hour and was on track to make my 7:30 flight. That’s when pulled out my phone to say as much and give credit where it was due. Then, I turned the corner and my stomach dropped.
Two federal immigration agents in masks, standing there near the gates. Not talking, directing or helping. Just standing there, about 20 yards from where passengers board their flights, like nightclub bouncers.
This is what the new normal looks like. Not just long lines or staffing shortages or the slow unraveling of a system under strain. There is something else layered on top of it.
The explanation we’re being given is simple: airports are struggling. TSA is understaffed. A federal funding crisis has left workers stretched thin, in some cases going weeks without pay. The system needs help.
But instead of fixing that system and paying the people who actually move passengers through security, stabilizing the workforce, addressing the bottlenecks, we’re seeing a different solution take shape.
Bring in immigration enforcement and deploy agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into civilian travel spaces. Not to replace TSA. Not to relieve pressure, but to stand there and to be seen.
This isn’t a left versus right issue. It’s top versus bottom. Because while TSA agents are struggling to make ends meet, while they wait on paychecks that aren’t coming, taxpayer dollars are still flowing elsewhere.
It’s flowing towards things like enforcement and optics. It looks like a strong version of security, but doesn’t actually solve the problem in front of you.
We were told these agents would be part of the process, positioned before TSA screening. Another checkpoint. Another layer.
That’s not what I saw. They weren’t screening passengers. They weren’t checking IDs. They weren’t moving people through the system.
They were standing near the gates, watching. And that’s the shift because when enforcement shows up in a space like that—unannounced, undefined, unexplained—it changes how people move. How they think. How they feel, even if nothing happens.
You don’t need to be undocumented to feel it, you just need to be there.
For years, immigration enforcement has operated at the edges of American life and now that boundary is dissolving. The airport is becoming the new border and it’s happening at the same time the system underneath it is struggling to function. That’s what should stop people. Not the presence of agents, but the absence of solutions.
