Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are now doing the jobs of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers, but one big difference is that they’re getting paid for it.
The partial government shutdown, entering its 44th day, has left more than 50,000 TSA officers without pay, leading to more than 450 workers quitting and thousands calling out of work, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data. President Donald Trump ordered ICE agents to U.S. airports to guard exits and check IDs to allow TSA agents to more quickly conduct security scans at checkpoints. Trump said ICE personnel can conduct immigration checks and arrests, though it’s not their primary purpose.
These ICE agents will continue to receive pay, even as TSA officers forgo earnings for five weeks, and the disparity has shined light on the pay differences between the two groups carrying out similar tasks.
According to TSA Career, a nongovernment website, the starting salary for TSA agents is $34,454, with the average officer salary between $46,000 to $55,000. The highest-paid TSA employee earns around $163,000.
Meanwhile, deportation officers are paid between $51,632 and $84,277, according to a job posting on a government website. ICE agents are also eligible for a $50,000 signing bonus, often given in $10,000 per-year increments, putting total pay at nearly double that of a TSA officer.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees and the only one representing TSA workers, claimed ICE agents were unqualified to replace and work alongside TSA officers at airports as they lacked the appropriate training.
Everett Kelley, president of the union, demanded TSA agents be paid, rather than replaced by other government employees.
“Our members at TSA have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe,” Kelley said in a statement on Sunday. “They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be.”
Why are ICE agents getting paid while TSA agents are not?
The reason behind why ICE agents continue to be paid while TSA agents work without paychecks comes down to where these two agencies receive their respective funding.
Despite both being under the umbrella of the DHS, ICE received a share of its funding from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which pumped ICE with about $75 billion over five years. TSA is funded through DHS, which the government ceased funding in February as Democrats demanded reforms on ICE following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.
On Tuesday, the Senate closed in on a proposal that would fund much of the DHS, including providing pay to TSA agents. The funding resumption would exclude ICE operations.
The libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, called funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “shutdown proof” in a February report, arguing Republicans “short-circuited the system of checks and balances” by shifting funding for immigration enforcement and defense spending outside of normal appropriations, wrestling in less oversight and greater partisanship in the budgeting process.
But the breakdown of who gets paid and who doesn’t during a government shutdown is a failure of a budget structure that goes beyond a particular administration, according to Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
The decision of who is deemed essential and nonessential, for example, depends on department personnel, while salary appropriations can be impacted by lapses in the congressional budget, which occur multiple times a year.
“There is this overarching dysfunction of the entire process,” Bilmes told Fortune during the government shutdown in October 2025. (During this shutdown, law enforcement officers including both ICE and TSA agents received “super checks” as well as overtime pay). “Every time you get into one of these situations—which has been on average four times a year for the last four to five years—there is an arbitrariness in who ends up being paid for their work, who ends up working, who ends up being furloughed.
“The arbitrariness is almost inherent in this dysfunction—a feature as well as being a bug,” she added.
