TSA official says workers have missed out on nearly $1bn in pay as airport turmoil continues amid shutdown – live – The Guardian

Some airports advise travelers to arrive four hours before their scheduled flights as TSA staff, who have been working without pay for over a month, are not reporting for duty
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Ha Nguyen McNeill, the acting administrator of the TSA, said that her agency has been shut down for 50% of the fiscal year so far. This includes the record-breaking lapse in federal funding last year that lasted 43 days.
“This Friday, we will have reached nearly $1bn in missed paychecks,” she told members of Congress at today’s hearing.
“Many in our workforce have missed bill payments, received eviction notices, had their cars repossessed and utilities shut off, lost their childcare, defaulted on loans, damaged their credit line and drained their retirement savings. Some are sleeping in their cars, selling their blood and plasma and taking on second jobs to make ends meet,” she added.
McNeill added that prior to this most recent shutdown, only 4% of TSA employees would not report to work. Now she said that “multiple major airports are experiencing days where 40 to 50% of their staff are calling out” because they cannot afford to work without pay.
In another variation of her theme of painting the Democrats as villains in the eyes of inconvenienced air travelers, the White House press secretary said: “I hear that Democrats might be flying out of town tomorrow. How convenient and lovely of them that they get to go to the airport, and that they’ll get to go home to their families.
“When you have families, TSA workers who are suffering, you have people across the country who are missing flights, for funerals and for work commitments because of Democrat politicians on Capitol Hill.”
Addressing speculation that vice-president JD Vance is skeptical about the war with Iran, Leavitt said: “The vice-president has always been … a key member of the president’s national security team. He’s been part of these discussions throughout this entire course of the administration. The vice-president has been by the president’s side every step of the way and any reporting otherwise is just completely false.”
Hijacking an accusation often leveled by Trump’s critics, Leavitt has repeatedly alleged that “the cruelty is the point” of Democrats’ tactics over the DHS funding impasse.
Leavitt dismissed soaring gasoline prices unleashed by US-Israel war on Iran as a “temporary short-term fluctuation”.
She added: “The president has said, once these combat operations are over, this administration is going to continue to unleash American energy. We’re continuing to do that every day, and we’re going to see prices at the pump go back down.
“This president is keeping them as low as he can during this short-term combat operation. And they’re going to go right back down when this is over.”
Challenged to address young voters who had voted for Trump based on his promise to keep the US out of wars, Leavitt said: “President Trump is doing this for you. He’s doing this for young people so that we are no longer threatened by a rogue terrorist regime in the Middle East that seeks to kill the brave men and women who serve in our country, in the Middle East, many of them young people themselves, young men and women who served this country honorably, in uniform and have been threatened, killed and maimed by the rogue Iranian terrorist regime for 47 years.”
Leavitt, addressing journalists at a White House briefing, turned the heat on Democrats over the ongoing partial closure of the Department of Homeland Security – which has affected airport security staff.
“Democrats in Congress are forcing American travelers to wait in hours long lines at airports across the country, robbing [Transportation Security Administraton] officers and other federal workers of their hard-earned paychecks that they use to feed their families, and causing billions of dollars in damage to our economy,” she said.
She said nearly 500 TSA officers have quit since what she called “the Democrat shutdown” began.
On the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to airports, she added: “President Trump, to alleviate this pressure, made the decision to send some of our amazing ICE agents to help alleviate that stress and address the long wait times. And for all of the critics of this solution, a few days ago, when it was proposed by the president, it is yielding results. Wait times have improved since ICE arrived, and they are doing everything in their power to help their fellow federal service members.”
Donald Trump’s scheduled visit to China will take place on 14 and 15 May, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has announced.
That is more than six weeks after Trump was meant to travel to Beijing for a summit with Xi Jinping, the Chinese communist leader. Trump announced last week that he had asked China for a postponement, citing the Iran war.
Leavitt said Xi and his wife would visit Washington later this year for a reciprocal visit, on a date yet to be fixed.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who detained a Guatemalan woman and her nine-year-old daughter at San Francisco international airport on Monday were acting on a tip off from the Transportation Security Authority (TSA), according to the New York Times.
The report sheds fresh light on an incident at the airport that was videotaped and widely shared on social media.
Footage showed the woman, named by the Times as Angelina Lopez-Jimenez, on her knees crying as two plain-clothed agents handcuffed her. An unseen woman repeatedly asks an agent to show his identification card, questioning the detention’s legality.
San Francisco and airport officials initially suggested the woman was in transit with the agents and that she had not been arrested at the airport.
But according to the Times, Lopez-Jimenez and her daughter Wendy were flagged by TSA officials on Friday when their names appeared on a passenger list for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to Miami. The agency then informed ICE, according to government documents obtained by the paper.
The mother and daughter were living in Contra Costa county in California. Lopez-Jimenez has no criminal history, although she is said to have entered the US illegally.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will speak to reporters shortly, we’ll bring you all the key lines here.
Federal prosecutors examined whether Donald Trump showed a classified map to people on his plane after his first term, including to his now White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to justice department materials produced to the House judiciary committee.
The incident was described in a 13 January 2023 briefing memo prepared for the then attorney general, Merrick Garland – roughly six months before special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
The memo also described the documents Trump retained as some of the most protected materials held by the federal government, estimating that one document was accessible to only six people, and alleging that the documents were pertinent to his business interests.
Trump’s alleged disclosure of the map, as described in the memo, would mark the second known time he waved around a classified map in front of Wiles. The indictment charging Trump also described an incident where he showed a classified map to people at his Bedminster club in New Jersey.
Here’s the story:
Throughout today’s hearing, Victoria Barton, an official at Fema, told lawmakers on the House homeland security committee that a portion of her agency’s staff was able to continue working thanks to the Disaster Relief Fund.
However, she later said that the fund only has $3.6bn remaining. If there was another major storm, depending on the magnitude, the fund could be depleted “pretty rapidly”.

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