TSA on Strike: Call-Outs, Resignations, and ICE at Airports

TSA officers did not go on strike in 2026, because federal law makes a strike by federal employees a felony. What happened during the DHS shutdown that began on February 14, 2026, looked like a strike from the traveler’s side without being one legally: unpaid officers called out sick in record numbers, more than 1,100 resigned, and security lines at major airports stretched past three hours. The disruption ran from mid-February through the end of April, when Congress finally reopened most of the Department of Homeland Security after 76 days, the longest shutdown in U.S. history.¹

Why TSA Officers Cannot Legally Strike

Federal employees are prohibited from striking under 5 U.S.C. §7311, which bars participation in any strike against the U.S. government. A violation is a felony under 18 U.S.C. §1918 and carries permanent disqualification from federal employment. Courts read the ban broadly: the test is whether an employee voluntarily withheld services in concert with others, and an organized sick-out can meet that definition even without a picket line.²

The precedent everyone in federal labor relations remembers is 1981, when President Ronald Reagan fired roughly 11,000 air traffic controllers who walked off the job as members of PATCO. The strikers were permanently banned from federal employment, the union was decertified, and its leaders were arrested.³ That history is a significant reason the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 47,000 TSA officers, organized no coordinated work stoppage in 2026. AFGE stuck to lobbying, litigation, and press campaigns. TSA and administration officials, for their part, described the absences as individual employees “running out of options” rather than as a labor action.⁴

What Actually Happened: Call-Outs and Resignations

DHS funding lapsed on February 14, 2026, after a congressional fight over immigration enforcement funding. About 95 percent of TSA’s 61,000 employees are classified as essential, so they were required to keep working without pay.⁵ Many officers were already financially depleted: a 43-day shutdown in fall 2025 had cost TSA about 1,110 officers and drained the savings of many who stayed.⁶

When paychecks stopped again, officers reported being unable to pay rent, afford childcare, or put gas in their cars. Some sold blood plasma. Others received eviction notices or faced vehicle repossession.⁷ TSA leadership told Congress that officers were sleeping in their cars in airport parking lots.⁴ Union leaders told lawmakers some members had asked whether their life insurance policies covered suicide.⁸

TSA’s normal unscheduled-absence rate is 2 to 4 percent.⁹ By March 22, the nationwide call-out rate hit 11.7 percent, the highest of the crisis, meaning roughly one in eight scheduled officers did not show up.¹⁰ By late March, TSA testimony put the rate at nearly 12 percent nationwide, with individual airports much higher.¹¹

Resignations climbed steadily. About 300 officers had quit by mid-March, 458 by March 24, and more than 1,110 by April 27. That total matched the entire loss from the fall 2025 shutdown, but hit a workforce already weakened by those earlier departures. Nearly half of the officers who resigned had more than three years of experience, and a third had more than five.¹²⁶ Replacing them takes time: new officers require four to six months of training before they can work a checkpoint.¹⁰

Which Airports Were Hit Hardest

The damage clustered in the South and along the Gulf Coast, though several major hubs elsewhere were badly disrupted too.

Houston Hobby saw call-out rates reach 55 percent on one Saturday in mid-March and stay above 40 percent for days. Security waits pushed past three hours, and the airport told travelers to arrive four to five hours before their flights.¹³¹¹
Houston Intercontinental peaked above 36 percent call-outs, with waits approaching two hours.¹²
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta lost more than a third of officers on multiple days. Lines wrapped through baggage claim and out terminal doors, and the airport recommended a four-hour buffer.¹¹¹⁴
Louis Armstrong New Orleans had call-outs above 35 percent and warned of two-hour waits.¹⁵
JFK approached 30 percent absences. At least four major airports, JFK among them, suspended online wait-time reporting because conditions were too volatile to predict.¹⁴
Philadelphia closed three of its six checkpoints to consolidate staff.¹⁶
Baltimore-Washington International travelers reported waits of up to three hours by late March.¹¹

The staffing collapse hit during spring break, when U.S. airlines expected 2.8 million passengers a day.¹⁷ Acting TSA administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill told Congress the agency was seeing the “highest wait times in TSA history.”¹⁰ Some travelers reported waits over four and a half hours.¹⁴ On a single Tuesday in mid-March, roughly 7,500 flights were delayed and more than 2,000 canceled nationwide, driven by the combination of staffing shortages and severe weather.¹³

Global Entry enrollment was frozen for nearly three weeks before being restored in mid-March. TSA suspended security escorts for members of Congress. Acting deputy administrator Adam Stahl warned that smaller airports might “quite literally shut down” if conditions worsened, and TSA reportedly drew up a list of about 75 airports that could be closed to reassign officers to larger hubs. The list was never made public and no airports were fully shut down; instead, airports consolidated checkpoints and closed PreCheck lanes to concentrate remaining staff.¹¹¹⁶¹⁸

ICE Agents Sent to Airports

On March 23, the Trump administration deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to 14 airports, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, JFK, LaGuardia, both Houston airports, Chicago O’Hare, Newark, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and two others in Florida and Puerto Rico.¹⁴

The agents did not perform security screening. Under TSA protocols, they handled lower-skill tasks: guarding exit lanes, operating document-check machines, managing crowds, and handing out water in some cases.¹⁹ A group of former TSA officials called the deployment “a political, publicity action, not a practical solution,” noting the agents lacked training to detect explosives or weapons. AFGE President Everett Kelley called the ICE agents “replacement workers” and said “putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap — it creates one.”²⁰ Union representatives also said immigrant TSA employees feared being detained by ICE agents working alongside them.

Back Pay by Executive Order

On March 27, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing DHS to pay TSA employees using funds with a “reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations.”²¹ The money came from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a 2025 domestic policy package that had provided DHS with $10 billion for border-related operations. TSA was not named in that legislation, but the administration argued the Secretary had discretion to define what activities supported border safeguarding. Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, said he did not believe the reprogramming was lawful, citing the principle that appropriations must be applied only to the purposes Congress intended.²²

Most TSA employees received retroactive paychecks on March 30 covering roughly four weeks of back wages, though about one week’s pay was still owed. The order did not establish a recurring payment schedule, leaving uncertainty about further paychecks if the shutdown continued.²³²⁴ The order applied only to TSA. Workers at other DHS components, including CISA and FEMA, continued to work without pay.²⁵

How the Shutdown Ended

By late April, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Congress the agency had burned through its emergency funding and was “completely out of the slush fund.”¹ On April 30, the House passed a bill by voice vote to reopen most of DHS, ending the 76-day shutdown. The Senate had unanimously advanced the legislation in March, but House leadership had held it up while pursuing a broader deal. The bill funded most DHS operations for five months but excluded ICE and Border Patrol, which Republican leaders intended to fund separately through budget reconciliation.²⁶ Secretary Mullin confirmed DHS reopened on May 1.²⁷

What the Shutdown Left Behind

TSA emerged with more than 1,100 fewer experienced officers and a workforce that stood at about 50,000 officers as of late March, down from 61,000 total employees before the crisis.²¹ Because new hires need four to six months of certification training, none of the officers brought on during the shutdown would be checkpoint-ready in time for the FIFA World Cup starting June 11. McNeill told the House Homeland Security Committee on March 25 that the agency was “facing a potential perfect storm of severe staffing shortages and an influx of millions of passengers” with less than 80 days to prepare.²⁸

AFGE Council 100 President Hydrick Thomas said the recruitment problem would outlast the funding fight: “It’s going to be hard to recruit people to work for TSA.”¹⁰ Federal employees are guaranteed back pay once a shutdown ends under a 2019 law, but that guarantee did not help officers who could not pay rent while the shutdown was still running.²⁹

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