ICE agents can earn double the pay of TSA workers—and economists caution their compensation is more ‘shutdown-proof’ than other government jobs

(SeaPRwire) –   Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are currently performing duties typically handled by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel, with a key distinction being that they are receiving compensation for their work.

Now in its 44th day, the partial government shutdown has resulted in over 50,000 TSA officers going unpaid, causing more than 450 employees to resign and thousands more to miss work, as per Department of Homeland Security (DHS) figures. President Donald Trump directed ICE agents to U.S. airports to monitor exits and verify identification, a move intended to free up TSA agents to expedite security screenings at checkpoints. Trump noted that while ICE staff can perform immigration verifications and make arrests, this is not their main objective.

These ICE agents will keep getting their salaries, even as TSA officers have gone without income for five weeks. This discrepancy has highlighted the wage gap between the two groups performing comparable functions.

As reported by the non-governmental site TSA Career, the entry-level wage for a TSA agent is $34,454, while the average officer’s pay ranges from $46,000 to $55,000. The top-earning TSA employee makes approximately $163,000.

In contrast, deportation officers earn between $51,632 and $84,277, based on a listing on a government job website. ICE agents also qualify for a $50,000 signing bonus, typically distributed in $10,000 annual installments, which can bring their total compensation to almost twice that of a TSA officer.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union and the sole representative for TSA workers, stated that ICE agents were not qualified to substitute for or collaborate with TSA officers at airports due to a lack of proper training.

Union president Everett Kelley insisted that TSA agents should receive their pay instead of being supplanted by other government workers.

“Our TSA members have been reporting for duty daily without receiving a paycheck because they are committed to the goal of ensuring the safety of air travelers,” Kelley said in a Sunday statement. “They merit payment, not replacement by armed, untrained agents whose potential dangers have been demonstrated.”

Why are ICE agents getting paid while TSA agents are not?

The explanation for why ICE agents remain on the payroll while TSA agents work without pay hinges on the distinct funding sources for each agency.

Although both fall under the DHS, ICE obtained a portion of its budget from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated roughly $75 billion to the agency over a five-year period. TSA, however, is financed via the DHS, whose funding was halted by the government in February after Democrats called for ICE reforms subsequent to the deadly shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

On Tuesday, the Senate advanced a proposal to fund a significant part of the DHS, which would include restoring pay for TSA agents. This renewed funding would not cover ICE activities.

In a February analysis, the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute described the funding mechanism established by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as “shutdown proof,” contending that Republicans bypassed the system of checks and balances by moving funding for immigration enforcement and defense spending outside standard appropriations, thereby reducing oversight and increasing partisanship in budget proceedings.

However, according to Linda Bilmes, a public finance specialist and senior lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, the pattern of which employees are paid during a government shutdown points to a broader failure of the budget system, not just the policies of a specific administration.

For instance, the designation of which roles are essential versus non-essential is determined by department officials, and salary funding can be affected by interruptions in the congressional budget, which happen several times annually.

“The entire process is characterized by a fundamental dysfunction,” Bilmes stated during the government shutdown in October 2025. (In that shutdown, law enforcement officers, including both ICE and TSA agents, were given “super checks” plus overtime pay). “Each occurrence of these situations—which have happened about four times per year for the past four to five years—introduces a randomness in determining which workers are compensated, which continue working, and which are furloughed.

“This randomness is almost built into the dysfunction—it is both a feature and a flaw of the system,” she added.