The airways just got a little more dangerous for traveling this holiday season as the Biden administration pulls US air marshals from the skies to babysit migrants at the Southern border. At first, marshals were asked to volunteer for immigration duty, but since there weren’t enough volunteers, the president and his staff have made this a mandatory order and have assigned reluctant agents, many of whom may be planning to refuse the directive.
Why are Air Marshals Being Moved?
Despite more than four million illegal immigrants crossing the border since Joe Biden first sat behind the Resolute Desk, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas insists there isn’t a crisis. The presidential staff has backed this up, saying everyone is doing their jobs. If that were the case, then why risk another 9/11, as Sonya Labosco of the Air Marshal National Council warned, by pulling security from air travel during the busiest time of the year – and for such menial tasks?
These highly trained officers are being forced to serve sandwiches, transport migrants, and sit for hours “guarding and protecting” migrants who are already in a secure setting. Labosco said:
“We have been decimated. We have been depleted. We’re on less than 1% of flights. These ground-based duties that they’re pulling us out of the sky to go to the border are demolishing our chances of stopping another 9/11.”
Normally, around 5% of flights have air marshals aboard, but now that is down to just about 1%. And it isn’t like there haven’t been any serious incidents. As Labosco explained, her group has even written the president a couple of letters – which, so far, have had no response:
"We actually wrote him another letter over the weekend because we had a level four and a level three incident. Level four means that they tried to breach the cockpit. Level three, we had two of those, which means there were life-threatening behaviors on one of those aircraft. An individual had a straight razor to a passenger's throat. So these are very serious incidents."
In November, there were two such occurrences. A Frontier Airlines flight leaving Cincinnati and heading to Tampa had to make an emergency landing in Atlanta after a traveler started threatening passengers with a boxcutter. Then, on November 21, Merrill Darrell Fackrell, 41, on a JetBlue flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to Salt Lake City held a straight-edge razor blade to a female passenger’s throat. According to Fox News, the man blocked the movie she had been watching and told her to pause it. When she removed her headphones, she realized he had the blade to her throat. The woman managed to escape into the aisle while her husband, who sat nearby, sought assistance at the front of the plane.
Labosco warned that Americans will suffer because they think they are safe with trained air marshals in flight, but “they’re just simply not,” she said. Is a mutiny of federal agents pending? David Londo, president of the Air Marshal National Council, seems to think so, telling the Washington Examiner:
“The rank and file air marshals are going to refuse to deploy and risk termination. You’re almost going to have a mutiny of a federal agency, which is unheard of.”
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The outlet noted that “Dozens of federal air marshals have agreed to refuse a Biden administration order that they leave their assignments and go to the southern border, where they will drive, feed, and care for illegal immigrants due to a shortage of Border Patrol agents.”
Londo continued: “These highly skilled [air marshals] are being made to perform mainly non-law enforcement civilian humanitarian duties,” which include heating up sandwiches and driving migrants who are in custody to the hospital, and then waiting inside for hours on “hospital watch.”
It all seems like a tragic misuse of resources - and a needless one if the administration is to be believed. If there’s no crisis at the border, why divert security from our airways?
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