Why Are Air Marshalls Too Busy to Track Illegal Migrants?

AP Photo/Michael Dwyer

This is one of those questions that seems as if it should have been an obvious one to ask, but nobody ever thought to get around to bringing it up until some reporters bothered to ask the appropriate authorities about it. We've had countless illegal migrants flying around the country on the taxpayer's dime thanks to Joe Biden's open border policies for years now. They've been showing up all over the place, with many turning out to have criminal records and going on to commit new crimes in their adopted home country. Didn't they all need to pass through TSA checkpoints? Shouldn't at least some of them have been identified, detained, and sent back home or at least placed in detention? The New York Post finally thought to ask some of them that question and the answers they received were filled with frustration. It turns out that most of them have been too busy tracking potential January 6 defendants to go after the illegal migrants. 

Advertisement

US air marshals are so distracted tracking Jan. 6 suspects and other domestic threats that they are not devoting enough resources to policing the thousands of migrants flying around the country without IDs, sources say.

A TSA employee told The Post that Americans “should feel horrible” and “threatened” about the terrifying situation.

“None of the people that are coming through the border who are getting flight tickets are getting vetted by hardly any manner,’’ while US citizens are being forced to tightly adhere to airport security’s stringent ID requirements, the source said.

Most of these federal air marshals have orders to focus their attention on targets of the Transportation Security Administration’s “Quiet Skies Program.” That would normally make sense because the QSP is part of the terror watch list. But there are only so many TSA agents available to handle that workload. The people on the QSP watchlist tend to be citizens with documentation that can be quickly checked and processed. And it just so happens that most of Biden's migrants have no such documents. The people who wind up being vetted also just happen to include people who showed up on lists of those who are believed to have been in the Capitol on January 6. Funny how that works out, isn't it?

Advertisement

The frustration experienced by the TSA agents is on display. One said, “We’re scrutinizing our own people and letting other countries, other nationalities just come and do whatever they want to in our country. And Air Marshals aren’t getting put on those flights." In other words, it's impossible to detain the bad guys when nobody is vetting them, so we're only catching the Americans that we're able to vet. So who should the higher-priority criminal be? The person who escaped from a Venezuelan prison or the guy who may have purchased a hot dog a block from the riot on January 6?

Standing policy has been to vet those with verifiable ID. That could be in the form of an ID or arrest record from a nation that cooperates with us, which Venezuela does not. As for everyone else, we're supposed to "take them at their word." Because why would an upstanding group of citizens like that lie to the TSA, right? 

The TSA and the rest of the entire DoJ needs a thorough housecleaning when a new administration arrives in town. What we need to be asking next is who is more likely to clean up that mess... the people who created it to begin with? It is to laugh.

Advertisement

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on HotAir Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
Advertisement
Advertisement