‘Extremely dangerous’ reassignment of TSA’s federal air marshals for ICE flights more widespread than previously known

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began standing around doing nothing in airports across the country this week, following President Trump’s claim they would be helping to relieve shortages of Transportation Security Administration agents caused by the ongoing DHS shutdown.

It may have looked to travelers like a brand-new chapter in “Everything that touches ICE turns into ICE,” but ICE has actually secretly had its tentacles in TSA for awhile. Or, at least, in a subset of TSA, the Federal Air Marshal Service, where hundreds of air marshals have been diverted from their duties protecting commercial air travel from terrorist attacks to work security on ICE flights.

ICE’s use of air marshals has been much more extensive than previously reported, largely involuntary, and, according to Sonya LaBosco of the nonpartisan Air Marshal National Council, has made commercial air travel less safe. Three former flight attendants who have flown with air marshals said while they were generally fine, the air marshals’ inexperience, disinterest, and dehumanization of the migrant passengers sometimes led to serious safety lapses.

A senior DHS official who did not identify themselves said: “Any allegation that Federal Air Marshals have been reassigned to ICE is FALSE. On a rotating basis, Air Marshals conduct in-flight security operations in support of ICE flights.” The official did not explain what the difference was between “reassigned” and “conduct[ing] in-flight security operations in support of ICE flights.” (There isn’t one.)

ICE and TSA did not respond to requests for comment. Days after I sent the agencies a list of questions about the allegations in this story, Supervisory Air Marshal In Charge Tess R. Hawkins abruptly informed air marshals in the Minneapolis field office that their ICE flight duty would be ending as early as this week, according to an email I obtained. Hawkins said the decision “follows ICE’s determination that their contracted security levels have increased” to the point where “support is no longer required” – a claim that makes little sense, since air marshals replaced the ICE agents on each ICE flight, not the contracted security guards that ICE agents supervise.

When asked about the email, LaBosco said, “That’s the only thing that ever works is pressure from the media. They’re not worried about doing the wrong thing, they’re worried about somebody finding out when they do the wrong thing.”

A Not-So-Temporary Redeployment

When CNN’s Rene Marsh first reported last July that air marshals were filling in for ICE agents on deportation flights, Trump administration officials insisted it was only about 200 marshals, who had volunteered for single-trip deployments on “select flights.”

Even then, LaBosco told CNN some air marshals had been heavily pressured to “volunteer.” Since then, she told me, all pretense of choice has been abandoned, and cohorts of 250 air marshals have been continuously assigned for 60-day ICE deployments throughout the fall and winter into 2026.

The three former flight attendants I spoke with all said they had not seen any federal agents except air marshals on ICE flights since early last summer. All three worked for Omni Air International, the ICE charter that does large-jet removals to Africa and Asia, and all of them have recently quit, in part because of Omni’s increased, and increasingly cruel, ICE flights, and spoke with me on condition of anonymity.

While it is possible air marshals have been “selected” only for Omni’s flights, the numbers indicate it is likely more, and perhaps all, ICE flights. With approximately two dozen charter aircraft operating 50-60 ICE flights daily, and with 2-10 federal agents on each flight (depending on the size of the aircraft), 250 air marshals could theoretically cover all of those flights.

The cohorts of 250 also regularly overlapped, LaBosco said, due to training sessions before each 60-day deployment and repositioning for days afterward, so there have been times when 500-750 air marshals may have been diverted to ICE.

The exact number of air marshals is secret, but LaBosco said the 2,000-3,000 estimate in the CNN story was incorrect, and there were currently fewer than 2,000. If true, that would mean on any given day over the last nine months, at least 13 percent and occasionally 40 percent of air marshals have not been performing the duties they were chartered by Congress after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to do.

“We are bound by 49 USC 44917 to protect commercial flights. There’s nothing within that USC code that allows [DHS] to remove us from a commercial flight to go into a private charter,” LaBosco, who is a former air marshal, said. “Why are we taking chances in our aviation domain, to destabilize it?”

AMNC has filed complaints about the redeployments with the DHS inspector general, outgoing DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s office, and “every congressional oversight committee,” LaBosco said, providing documents to prove this, but it has yet to receive any response. AMNC also filed complaints during the Biden administration, she noted, when a smaller group of air marshals were sent to the border for a brief period.

LaBosco also raised concerns about air marshals’ core mission being permanently compromised if they are identified while boarding ICE flights, because air marshals on commercial flights operate undercover.

In January, CBS News reported three federal air marshals were “chased out” of a restaurant in Los Angeles by angry protesters who “mistakenly” believed they were ICE agents. The story only quoted the restaurant owner and local and federal law enforcement, who depicted the “mob” as paranoid, and gave no other reason for why the protesters thought they were ICE. There are several ICE field offices and one TSA field office a short drive away from the restaurant.

‘Don't Feel Bad for These Guys’

The three former Omni flight attendants described the air marshals they had worked with on ICE fights as mostly friendly and professional, and they agreed with LaBosco that some were pleased about the temporary deployment, while others were not happy about it it all.

But some air marshals seemed more interested in chatting with another in the first-class section than in supervising the flights, they said, and all of them seemed to have adopted the same cruel attitude toward the shackled migrants onboard that they observed with ICE agents and ICE-contracted guards.

“They’re like, ‘Don’t feel bad for these guys, they’re murderers, rapists,’ blah blah blah,” one said.

Guards and air marshals “would tell us during the briefings, ‘They’re all rapists. They were all in prison in for 15 years. This guys molested a 5-year-old. Don’t be nice to them,’” another flight attendant said. “And I know that wasn’t the case with all of them. Maybe like one or two, if that. They just wanted us to not feel bad for them.”

Eighty percent of migrants in ICE custody have no criminal convictions, according to ICE’s own data.

On one deportation flight, one of the flight attendants recalled a senior air marshal making cruel jokes about a migrant’s appearance while going through the woman’s paperwork, to get laughs from guards and air marshals.

The ICE-contracted guards were notoriously rude to flight attendants, starting fights and ignoring safety instructions, all of them said – something ProPublica has also reported on other airlines’ ICE flights. The air marshals – who, as the Flight Officer(s) In Charge, were the guards’ superiors – tended to let the guards do whatever they wanted, the flight attendants said, since the guards were more experienced with ICE flights.

One flight attendant also recalled an incident in which an air marshal inflated a portable air mattress to sleep on, and when a flight attendant told him he couldn't block the aisle, “he had a whole fit.”

Perhaps the most serious of the flight attendants' allegations involved unaccompanied migrant children who were being deported. The ICE Air Operations Handbook says unaccompanied children must be “separated from unrelated adults at all times” and seated “near officers and under their close supervision.” But one flight attendant said that on several flights with air marshals onboard, they witnessed unaccompanied children being assigned to “temporary families” – unrelated migrant adults who would care for them during the flights. The other two flight attendants said they had not seen this, but that they were allowed to interact so little with the migrant passengers that it was possible this happened on their flights without them noticing.

ICE and TSA did not respond to requests for comment. DHS responded only to the allegation about unaccompanied minors, saying, “ICE is NOT assigning unaccompanied children to temporary families.” It is unclear if this denial also included air marshals and ICE-contracted guards.

LaBosco said if true these incidents would go against air marshal training and would be “unprofessional and wrong.” She hoped the flight attendants would contact her so she could find out more and speak with the air marshals involved, she said.

Regardless, air marshals who have talked to AMNC about the ICE flights agreed with what flight attendants and their union representatives have been saying for years: These flights are unsafe.

“Many of them don’t ever want to go back and do this, they felt it was extremely dangerous,” LaBosco said.

Thank you for reading. I am a former Washington Post staff writer and, as far as I know, the only journalist in America covering ICE flights full time. I am committed to keeping this reporting non-paywalled, but if you are able, please sign up for a paid subscription or send me a one-time tip, so I can continue this important work. –Gillian