LaGuardia runway reopens after removal of Air Canada wreckage as security lines grow

Long delays continued to torment air travelers at metropolitan-area airports Thursday but flights resuming at LaGuardia after a fatal runway crash and President Donald Trump announcing plans to pay Transportation Security Administration agents, appeared to be hints that relief was in sight.

Trump on Thursday evening said he would sign an emergency order instructing the Homeland Security secretary to immediately pay TSA agents, many of whom stopped working after going weeks without pay because of a partial government shutdown. Trump announced his decision in a social media post saying he wanted to quickly stop the "Chaos at the Airports."

Homeland Security, which operates the TSA, last received funding in mid-February, with Democratic lawmakers demanding restraints on the way immigration officers conduct enforcement and removal operations. When their paychecks stopped, TSA agents began calling in sick and some quit. That led to unusually long check-in lines at airports across the nation.

Those problems persisted Thursday.   

By early afternoon, passengers started to stack up at LaGuardia, with an hour-and-a-half wait in the Terminal B general security line. The precheck line was faster, according to an airport employee, but it stretched all the way to the parking garage. By mid-afternoon, Kennedy Airport's Terminal 8 was worse: "A few hours, two or three," said an airport employee at the start of the security line, which was hard to measure: between its start near the terminal doors and the security checkpoint a few hundred feet away, it folded back on itself 10 times.    

Armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in ballistic vests, deployed by the Trump administration to major airports across the country this week, patrolled at Kennedy and LaGuardia.

Kennedy traveler Osman Ali, 28, and a cloud engineer from Pittsburgh with a 20-hour, two-stop journey to Pakistan ahead of him, said he would allow four hours to clear the line. Only in America, said Ali, would a self-imposed crisis grow to these proportions.

"Look at a broken country like Pakistan," he said. "We have our fair share of problems, but you never see an airport unstaffed. It's as essential as a hospital ... You've got to make sure people are safe to travel." 

Back at LaGuardia, traveler Emily Merrin, 32, a Pilates instructor from Byron Bay, Australia, arrived six hours early for a 6 p.m. flight to Toronto, where she needed to make a connecting flight home. Her assessment of American air travel: "pretty chaotic, to be honest. Maybe I just came at a bad time."

Merrin said her flight into the United States was delayed nine hours because of the Air Canada crash Sunday night. The pilot and co-pilot were killed and several others injured after the jet, carrying more than 70 passengers, collided with a fire truck that was responding to a problem at another plane.

Merrin was mystified by one feature of American travel: the highly visible presence of armed security, now augmented, by Trump’s order, by hundreds of ICE officers with pistols and ballistic vests. In Australia, she said, "you don’t see that at the airport. Why would you?"

Merrin's visit to the United States came amid a political crisis, crystallized in an extraordinary Congressional hearing this week in which the acting head of TSA declared the agency was in free fall. 

Multiple Senate votes to restore DHS funding have failed. The most recent proposal, made by Republicans, would fund most of DHS but not the immigration enforcement and removal operations. The offer would add new conditions on immigration officers, and funding for body cameras, but excluded Democratic demands, such as requirements that federal agents wear identification and refrain from conducting raids around schools, churches or other sensitive places.

Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune, of South Dakota, on Thursday told reporters that Republicans had delivered their "last and best" offer. Lawmakers are scheduled to go on recess next week.

Asked Thursday what ICE officers’ duties were at Kennedy, LaGuardia and other metropolitan-area airports, and how their work was impacting passenger wait times, a DHS spokesperson forwarded a statement from the department's acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis that said, in part: "After receiving standard TSA training curriculum, ICE officers are guarding entrances and exits, assisting with logistics, doing crowd control, and verifying identification using TSA equipment and standard operating procedures. The more support we have available, the more efficiently TSA can focus on their highly specialized screening roles to efficiently get airport security lines moving faster." 

TSA officers, not ICE agents, are performing specialized screening functions, the spokesperson said. 

On Wednesday, according to the DHS spokesperson, more than 500 TSA officers had quit and more than 3,120 did not show up for work, a call-out rate of 11.4%. The call-out rate was 28.9% at Kennedy and 24.7% at LaGuardia.

Shortly before 7 p.m. Thursday, flight tracker FlightAware reported departure and arrival delays of more than an hour for LaGuardia. The airport had, after several days, been displaced from the top of FlightAware’s Misery Map rankings and occupied the second spot with 478 flight delays and 204 cancellations, amounting to 53% of outbound and 68% of inbound flights canceled or delayed. Kennedy had no cancellations, with 16% of inbound flights and 28% of outgoing flights delayed. 

With AP