U.S. President Donald Trump during the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) annual fundraising dinner in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 25, 2026. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
When President Donald Trump sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to airports, his supporters applauded the move as a great way to help out Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees who are feeling overwhelmed during a partial government shutdown. Trump's critics, however, countered that ICE's presence at airports did nothing to make TSA agents' jobs easier or shorten long lines at airports — and if anything, they got in the way.
Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in a biting article published on March 25, argued that Trump's real motivation wasn't helping beleaguered TSA agents — he saw the ICE agents as a way to "bully" and "trigger the liberals." And Marcotte's Salon colleague Chauncey DeVega sees Trump's ICE/airports move as part of his "authoritarian" push to restrict "freedom of movement."
"Authoritarian regimes attempt to control freedom of movement, association and privacy; this is one of the most direct ways that such leaders exercise power," DeVega explains in an article published the day after Marcotte's. "People internalize the restrictions and conform. Those who refuse to do so are punished. The Trump Administration is now using America's airports as a space for authoritarian training and conditioning."
DeVega notes that in a 2024 report, Freedom House pointed out that authoritarian regimes "around the world use mobility controls — revoking citizenship, passport restrictions, travel bans — to coerce and punish dissidents, activists, journalists, and ordinary people."
According to Freedom House, "For people targeted in this way, mobility controls produce a sense of powerlessness."
Paul Gowder, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, views airports as a place where authoritarians make a point of exercising control.
Gowder told DeVega, "The federal government has created agencies and personnel trained and socialized in operating in these liminal spaces. Most infamous is the Border Patrol, which has a long record of brutality — predictable, because they are trained to deal with people with lesser rights, in spaces where monitoring of their conduct is thin or nonexistent."
DeVega warns, "When militarized guardians of the border and the larger national security state are turned inward against a country's own citizens, it is known as the boomerang effect. This is a defining feature of democracies collapsing into authoritarianism…. Civil and human rights abuses at airports are a feature of this system, not a bug — and a measure of how far Trump is pushing its boundaries to advance his authoritarian project."
