For two days, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were seen at the Atlanta airport largely walking around and observing, not assisting with airport security screening.

On Wednesday morning, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution witnessed a change: a handful of people in ICE uniforms appearing to take over some vetting of passenger boarding passes and IDs, a function often done by the Transportation Security Administration.

Reporters also observed an apparent training session of other ICE officers to do ID checks by TSA at a checkpoint.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers appeared Wednesday to be checking boarding passes and IDs, work often done by Transportation Security Administration officers at the Atlanta airport. (Ben Hendren for the AJC)

ICE has been taking heat for its presence in airports across the country, in particular from the union representing many of the TSA officers who have been working for more than five weeks without pay because of a stalled congressional budget fight over immigration enforcement.

ICE itself is largely being paid through a past budget allocation. But other Department of Homeland Security essential employees, including from TSA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and Customs and Border Protection, are not.

In response to a question Wednesday about if ICE was, in fact, taking on new security functions at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, DHS acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said, “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.”

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, has pushed back on ICE’s role to cover for TSA. In a statement Sunday, he said “ICE agents are not trained or certified in aviation security.”

“TSA officers spend months learning to detect explosives, weapons, and threats specifically designed to evade detection at checkpoints — skills that require specialized instruction, hands-on practice, and ongoing recertification. You cannot improvise that. Putting untrained personnel at security checkpoints does not fill a gap. It creates one,” he said.

To be sure, ID checks aren’t always handled by TSA employees.

The Clear membership program has, for years, allowed its members to bypass the standard TSA ID check, instead using the private company’s biometric ID verification system.

President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday he was proud to see immigration agents in airports “helping people with bags, even picking up and cleaning areas.”

He said ICE is rehabbing the agency’s image after the agency was “unfairly maligned” by Democrats, who have widely criticized the agency after immigration raids in cities led to protests and the deaths of two Americans.

Morning travelers wait in long lines Wednesday for TSA Precheck at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport amid the ongoing partial government shutdown. (Ben Hendren for the AJC)

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt added in a briefing Wednesday the shorter lines many airports are experiencing show that Trump made the right call in sending in the immigration officers.

But lesser lines on Tuesday and Wednesday are also in line with traditionally lower midweek travel volumes.

Lines Tuesday and Wednesday morning were quite heavy before tapering off in the middle of the day. Late Wednesday afternoon, lines picked back up during the afternoon rush and abated again before sunset.

Around that time, the AJC noticed immigration agents weren’t assisting with ID checks. Instead, officers wearing the insignia of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as that of Customs and Border Patrol, have made sporadic appearances walking through public areas both inside and outside the airport.

Passenger totals are expected to pick back up Thursday ahead of weekend travel.

The national callout rate among TSA officers remained more than 11% on Tuesday, DHS said. Atlanta’s callout rate remained close to 37%, among the highest in the country.

“This is a dire situation,” TSA acting Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill said Wednesday, according to The Associated Press.

In remarks to Congress, she described mounting hardships facing unpaid airport workers and warned lawmakers must ensure “this never happens again.”

The AP reported neither Republican senators, who made the latest offer, nor Democrats, who are demanding more changes in immigration enforcement, appeared closer to a compromise to end the deadlock over DHS’ funding.

Trump, who initially appeared to have given his nod to the deal, has declined to lend it his full support, AP reported.

George Borek, an AFGE union steward representing Atlanta TSA officers, told the AJC on Tuesday his colleagues “are in dire need. We’re at the breaking point. The balloon is ready to burst, and it’s probably going to burst this weekend when Friday comes, and there’s not another paycheck.”

Morning travelers wait in lines that strech out onto the sidewalk at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport amid the ongoing partial goverment shutdown, Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (Ben Hendren for the AJC)

An AJC reporter at the Atlanta airport observed a mix of reactions to ICE’s presence at the security checkpoints.

When one man saw ICE conducting ID checks, he muttered expletives under his breath. But a woman entering TSA PreCheck saw a few officers standing near the entrance to those security lines and thanked them for everything they have been doing.

ICE officers in the airport have declined AJC reporters’ interview requests.

During a Sunday appearance on CNN, White House border czar Tom Homan said ICE agents are not trained for the type of screening done at airport checkpoints and would instead help with other tasks.

“We’re simply there to help TSA do their job in areas that don’t need their specialized expertise,” Homan said. “Screening through the X-ray machine — not trained in that, we won’t do that.”

But there are “certain parts of security that TSA is doing that we can move them off those jobs and put them in the specialized jobs (to) help move those lines,” Homan said.

“Certainly a highly trained ICE law enforcement officer can cover an exit,” to prevent people from entering secure areas through the exits.

— Staff writers Kelly Yamanouchi, Vanessa McCray, Lautaro Grinspan and Tia Mitchell contributed to this article.