This week, Donald Trump will turn U.S. airports into dystopian hellholes.

Long lines. ICE watchmen. Sudden arrests. Soaring prices. How Donald Trump's heavy hand will be visible in every terminal.

If you travel through an American airport this week, you may not recognize the country you’re in. Just know this: it’s all by design.

Travelers at any major U.S. airport will soon feel like they’ve entered a foreign land. Long lines will snake out the doors. ICE agents will patrol the terminals looking for people to pluck out, arrest, and deport. And soaring ticket prices (in some cases, double or triple what they cost just a month ago) will hit travelers like a gut punch, giving them the kind of economic vertigo more commonly associated with countries suffering from runaway inflation.

All of it will have a single source: Donald Trump.

Indeed, the U.S. airport is about to become the most visible symbol of America’s speedy slide into autocracy.

I’ll start with the lines.

Since February 14th, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been operating without full congressional funding. Republicans cannot pass a DHS spending bill on their own (a remarkable failure for a party that holds majorities in both the House and Senate). Democrats have refused to supply the necessary votes until the administration agrees to some basic conditions to prevent DHS from becoming the centerpiece of a police state. Basic conditions.

Democrats are not demanding the dismantling of ICE or a reversal of the administration’s immigration agenda, although personally I think they should. In fact, from a legal perspective, their demands sound almost meager. In exchange for their votes to fund DHS, they’re asking that ICE agents identify themselves when making arrests, that people detained be told why they are being arrested, that agents not kick down doors without Fourth Amendment warrants, and that individuals not be disappeared into a shadow network of detention facilities before their families or lawyers can locate them.

In other words, Democrats are insisting that the federal government obey the U.S. Constitution.

The White House has said “no.” Instead, Trump has chosen to make the standoff your problem. That is, if you have any plans to travel through a U.S. airport in the near future, the administration wants you to suffer. By design. The president of the United States is betting that you’ll be willing to forfeit your constitutional rights in frustration rather than deal with long lines at the airport and mounting flight cancellations. Seriously. And unfortunately, he may be right.

Fifty thousand TSA workers — essential employees legally required to show up — have been working without pay for over a month. More than 400 have quit. And travelers at some of the nation’s busiest airports have been told to arrive as much as five hours early. The whole situation is expected to spiral further this coming Friday, March 27, when airport screeners are slated to miss their second paycheck.

All of this is happening on purpose.

The White House is hoping that by the time enough families are stranded in security lines with their luggage and screaming children, they’ll be angry enough to demand that whoever is “blocking” a deal just give in already! “Please,” they’ll shout to their representatives, “give Trump whatever he wants!” And what Trump wants is to keep doing what he’s been doing at DHS, including illegally jailing thousands and thousands of people, including American citizens, residents, visitors, and immigrants.

The White House says it’s going to send DHS agents to the airports to try to alleviate the suffering. But as always, the president let his real intentions slip this weekend.

Trump announced on Truth Social that, starting today, he would deploy ICE agents across U.S. airports to “do security like no one has ever seen before.” This includes patrolling terminals to identify people for “immediate arrest,” he said, if they’re suspected of not having lawful status. He told ICE to “GET READY.”

Anyone who has closed their eyes to the president’s authoritarian crackdown is going to have a hard time keeping them shut if they have travel plans. It’s worth pausing here to note that the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to travel freely within their own country. It’s not a conditional right. It’s also not a “privilege” extended at the government’s discretion.

Yet this week, the airports through which Americans exercise the right to freely travel will be patrolled by agents that the country has already seen brutally kill their fellow citizens, arrest lawful residents without any due process whatsoever, and disappear people into a secret network of detention facilities being constructed beyond public scrutiny. A year ago, most Americans could not have imagined this is what their country would look like.

But that’s not all.

The planes that U.S. travelers are boarding are fast becoming too expensive to afford, as prices surge and airlines consider scrapping routes altogether. The reason, again, is Trump. His war against Iran, which was launched without congressional authorization and which 92 percent of Americans believe should be ended ASAP, has sent global oil prices into a death spiral. Trump has tried to convince Americans that high prices are actually good for them.

The airport, then, is where all of it converges this week. Terminals are about to become dystopian hellholes, symbolic of everything happening in the United States. Trump’s campaign to assert his power domestically, intimidate the political opposition, transform DHS into his secret police, ignore the law, and launch wars wherever he damn well pleases… will show up in the one place that’s already stressful enough to visit.

More specifically, the long lines are his wager that he can frustrate you into surrendering your constitutional rights. The ICE agents — and the people plucked from the crowd in front of you — will be a reminder of who’s running this country and how the man in charges views his total authority. And the soaring prices will remain his unapologetic tax levied on the world for a war most of them don’t support.

So here’s to hoping that the millions of Spring Breakers who pass through those terminals don’t just bury their heads in the sand when they get to the beach. If they do, they’ll come home without a democracy.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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