LaGuardia security lines a 2-hour wait, despite Trump order to get TSA agents paid

Disgruntled travelers were still waiting in hourslong lines at LaGuardia Airport a day after President Donald Trump said he would stop the "chaos" at American airports with an emergency order to pay Transportation Security Administration workers who have gone weeks without paychecks.

Tim Kauffman, a spokesman for American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents 47,000 TSA employees who would normally be screening passengers and baggage at the nation’s airports, said Friday that “no [TSA officers] have been paid."

A spokesperson for Homeland Security, TSA’s parent department, said “TSA officers should begin seeing paychecks as early as Monday, March 30." Trump signed an executive action to pay TSA workers Friday afternoon, saying in a memo authorizing the payments that “America’s air travel system has reached its breaking point.” The White House said funding to pay TSA workers would come from Trump’s tax cut bill.

But on Friday, Day 42 of the funding crisis for Homeland Security, the line of harried, shuffling travelers waiting to clear the security checkpoint at LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B once more snaked across the terminal’s eastern half before doubling back on itself. An airport employee holding a yellow sign to indicate the start of the line told travelers the wait would be two hours.

“I just got here and I already hate it," said Devante Le, 29, a construction worker from the Eastchester section of the Bronx who hoped to get on a flight to Las Vegas. “The way our government ... it’s not as efficient as it should be."

Rebecca Alesia, a luxury travel adviser with Wanderology, based in Locust Valley, said the promised TSA payments were reason to hope that American travel would grow more bearable soon. “I think that people are basically stretched to the breaking point, and it sounds like the president is hearing that.” In the meantime, she said, she was encouraging her clients to thank TSA workers. “Acknowledge that they didn’t have to come to work, and be patient and kind," she said. 

Back in Terminal B, Meghan Carlton, 29, a student from the Bronx who’d arrived five hours early for a flight to Denver said she “didn’t have a lot of trust in getting the situation resolved. … The way our government doesn’t work is embarrassing. You grow up thinking everything is so official, and they can’t get simple things done.”

In the weeks they have gone without pay, thousands of TSA workers have begun calling out sick and hundreds have quit.

Congress has not given Homeland Security new funding since February, and any imminent deal appeared unlikely after House Republicans on Friday rejected a Senate-passed bill to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security.

Speaker Mike Johnson said House Republicans would instead seek to pass a bill that would fund the entire department at current levels until May 22. He also said he had spoken with Trump about the House Republican plan and that the president “supports it.”

House Republicans are angry that the bill passed early Friday by the Senate does not fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. Democrats refused to fund those departments without changes to immigration enforcement practices. They have asked to end enforcement operations at schools and churches and for warrants to be signed by judges before federal agents can forcibly enter private homes or other nonpublic spaces without consent, among other demands. 

By 9:30 p.m. Friday, flights in and out of LaGuardia were faring better than earlier in the evening. It now occupied the No. 5 spot on flight tracking service FlightAware's Misery Map of national airports. It had been No. 1 just after 7 p.m.

Still, 56% of LaGuardia's outbound flights were canceled or delayed and 63% of inbound flights were canceled or delayed as of 9:45 p.m., according to FlightAware. Departures were delayed an average of one hour and 38 minutes and increasing, according to FlightAware. 

The Associated Press contributed to this story.