'Look, I don't understand': Tom Homan unable to defend why Trump stalled on TSA pay [View all]

Source: Raw Story

March 29, 2026 10:21AM ET


Donald Trump’s border czar, who oversaw the president's demands to deploy ICE agents to the nation’s overwhelmed airports, was at a loss for words on CNN on Sunday morning as to why the president just didn’t pay TSA agents from the start when funding ran out.

With the country’s airports in chaos due to TSA no-showing at their jobs since they were not being paid, Tom Homan filled in the gaps to a slight degree with ICE agents pulled from their jobs, rounding up immigrants off the streets to help out overwhelmed TSA agents and harried travelers. On “State of the Union,” host Jake Tapper had to ask Homan twice why Trump didn’t alleviate the problem weeks ago. On his second try, Tapper asked, “But if if President Trump had the power to pay TSA agents this whole time, why only start doing it now?”

After a pause, Homan admitted, “Look, I don't understand. Look, I'm a cop, I don't understand the whole, you know, appropriations language, appropriations law. I just, you know, I'm just glad that President Trump is able to pay the TSA agents –– at least that's a start. But again, there's a lot more, many more, thousands more, tens of thousands of more DHS employees who are not being paid that need to be paid.”

The CNN host pressed, “Once TSA agents start getting paid, will ICE agents leave the airports?”. “We'll see,” the Trump official replied. “You know, it depends how many TSA agents come back to work, how many TSA agents have actually quit and have no plan coming back to work.

Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tsa/

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Apparently they are using "unused funds" from "last year's" appropriation - or so they say. Normally these appropriations are good for a single fiscal year and need to be renewed each year or it falls back into the Treasury. But given this was DHS, who knows what crap was written in the appropriations, including "multi-year".