Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey went on MSNBC over the weekend and offered a solution to airport chaos that is, by any measure, legally impossible. Frey claimed President Trump could simply "hire out more TSA agents" instead of deploying ICE officers to airports around the country. The problem: several agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, including the TSA, are in an ongoing funding shutdown now in its 37th day. The president does not have the authority to hire more TSA agents without congressional approval and funding.
He does, however, have the authority to deploy members of a separate agency, such as ICE, to supplement workers. Which is exactly what he announced he would do.
So Frey's big alternative to the plan that's actually legal is a plan that isn't.
According to Fox News, the DHS funding shutdown has produced real consequences. More than 400 TSA employees have quit their jobs. Thousands more have gone without pay for over a month. Some are calling in sick or refusing to show up entirely. The result has been hours-long lines at many major airports across the country, the kind of disruption that ripples through commerce, travel, and public confidence in basic government function.
Congressional Democrats, according to the report, want to negotiate reforms to immigration enforcement as part of any deal to restore funding. In other words, they are holding airport security hostage to weaken border enforcement. That is the actual cause of the TSA staffing crisis Frey is complaining about. And rather than direct his frustration at the Democrats, whose negotiating posture created the problem, he blamed the president for finding a workaround.
This is the pattern. Democrats block funding. Services degrade. Democrats blame the president for the degradation. Then they propose the very spending they refused to authorize as the obvious solution. It's a closed loop designed to make the executive branch look incompetent for problems the legislative branch manufactured.
Frey's full comments on MSNBC's "The Weekend" are worth reading carefully, because they reveal how deeply unserious the critique is. He started with a broad accusation:
"When he says that he's going to do security like no one has ever seen before, he doesn't actually mean that he's going to keep people secure."
Then came the legally impossible suggestion:
"If the goal here was safety at airports, he could hire out more TSA agents that do an incredible job at keeping our airports safe."
He could not, in fact, do that. Not without the funding that Congress has refused to pass. Frey either knows this and is being dishonest, or he doesn't know it and has no business opining on federal staffing authority. Neither option reflects well.
Frey then pivoted to local policing, arguing that if the president truly cared about public safety, "he would work with cities around hiring additional police officers and creating the kind of safety infrastructure that we need to keep people safe." This is from the mayor of Minneapolis, a city that became the national symbol of what happens when progressive leaders abandon law enforcement. The irony requires no elaboration.
He closed with the rhetorical flourish that tied it all together:
"The goal is to terrorize people. And for someone that states that they care so much about bringing the economy back — causing a ton of fear in airports, preventing the kind of safe air travel that we need for commerce, is not a good mechanism to do it."
The airport lines are not caused by ICE deployment. They are caused by TSA agents quitting and calling in sick because they haven't been paid. The ICE deployment is the response to that crisis, not the source of it. Frey has the causation exactly backward, and the framing exactly where Democrats need it: blame enforcement, not the people who defunded enforcement.
If Democrats believe TSA agents are essential, and they clearly do when it's rhetorically convenient, why are they conditioning their paychecks on immigration enforcement concessions? Thousands of federal employees are working without pay or walking off the job. Airports are grinding to a halt. And the Democratic position is that none of this gets resolved until the administration agrees to weaken its ability to enforce immigration law.
That is not a negotiation. It is a hostage situation dressed up as governance.
Frey's appearance on MSNBC was not policy analysis. It was stagecraft. He offered a solution he knew can't be implemented, blamed the president for a crisis Democrats engineered, and wrapped it all in the language of compassion and safety. It's the kind of performance that plays well in the studio but collapses under the smallest amount of scrutiny.
Fox News Digital reached out to Frey's office and MSNBC for comment. Neither responded.
The TSA agents still haven't been paid. Congressional Democrats still haven't passed the funding. And Jacob Frey still thinks the problem is the guy who sent reinforcements.