ICE Agents Will Be Allowed Behind Airport Checkpoints Without SIDA Badges — After Trump Reportedly Waives Badge Rules

With ICE personnel deployed to airports amidst a record TSA security lines during the partial government shutdown, the Trump administration has said that these agents wouldn’t be deployed behind checkpoints because they lacked the needed clearance.

The TSA’s acting chief told Congress on Wednesday that ICE was being used for “nonspecialized” tasks like line management, checking travel documents, and telling passengers how to load bins.

Unmasked ICE ERO officers deployed to Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport were seen handing out bottled water to travelers waiting in TSA lines that stretched as long as four hours on Wednesday. The scene marked the third straight day immigration agents have been sent… pic.twitter.com/LBXfSwVswG

— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 25, 2026

However, aviation watchdog JonNYC reports that requirements to allow ICE agents to go behind security are being waived by the Secretary of Transportation.

Seems like a bad idea to me:

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has issued an airport Security Directive that exempts all
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from needing a Security Identification Display Area (SIDA) badge to enter the sterile…

— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) March 26, 2026

These badges are for airport and airline employees, vendors, tenants, contractors, and similar workers.

Employers sponsor them, and then badge candidates need to provide two IDs, fingerprints, go through a TSA security threat assessment, a criminal background check, and receive training before being allowed unescorted access. TSA checks databases including terrorist watch lists, lawful status information, and identity.

The badging process normally takes 1-2 weeks, and applicants have to take a class and pass an exam. Batch of a larger than usual number of people could take longer.

They’re skipping this. The President expects the whole thing to be over soon and that was a stated reason for rejecting Elon Musk’s offer to pay TSA screeners as a stop gap. So presumably they don’t see much point in burdening TSA with screening these ICE employees that have been sent to airports for access.

What’s concerning, aside from giving access to people without the usual screening process (assuming that if they’re with ICE they’re fine) is that each airport is required to have a challenge program for people with authorized unescorted access in secured areas.

• SIDA-badged individuals are supposed to challenge people they see with access whose credentials aren’t displayed, or notify the proper authority.

• Airports often go further in local badge rules. Atlanta, for instance, requires badge display in secure and sterile areas and challenge/reporting of all non-displaying persons.

• If ICE officers are in those areas without a visible credential, that undermines the challenge culture that’s supposed to be part of security. A badge holder is supposed to question or report unbadged people. Instead the instruction will be ‘ignore those armed people’ there’s no longer a simple challenge rubric, and unbadged access without going through security becomes normalized. You create confusion over who can escort, who has local access authority at doors, and how airport police are supposed to distinguish a legitimate federal exception from an impostor.

If the partial government shutdown doesn’t end soon we could see lines get much worse (and the Transportation Secretary has warned of shutting down some small airports entirely) because more screeners become likely to call out as they seek work elsewhere rather than show up for deferred pay – which doesn’t cover immediate needs like rent and groceries.

Allowing ICE agents behind security checkpoints without screening or badging does not permit them to perform screening functions. They still aren’t trained in that (the statute specifies minimum 40 hours of training, and TSA academies aren’t set up to do this quickly at scale).

In the meantime it doesn’t seem like a good idea to skip over the checks that are normally required for secure access at the airport without security screening, and without credentials that other employees are trained to challenge for.