Democrats who want to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement aren’t getting away with the political hostage-taking they’re using to do it.

They’re trying to hold the Transportation Security Administration’s funding hostage until their demands for weakening ICE are met.

That means they’re also subjecting millions of air travelers to added anxiety, and worse, as security-line wait times stretch into hours.

According to CNN, “Half the nation’s busiest airports had more than a third of (TSA) agents call out Saturday.”

At LaGuardia on Sunday, passengers were in line for up to three hours — not because of the Air Canada accident late that evening but because TSA was understaffed all day.

What’s President Donald Trump doing about this mess?

He’s called the Democrats’ bluff.

Instead of gutting immigration enforcement, he’s sent ICE into more than a dozen of the nation’s busiest airports to make up for TSA’s missing manpower.

Democrats, predictably, are furious — and fearmongering to the nth degree.

“The last thing the American people need is for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports across the country, potentially to brutalize or to kill them,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries frothed on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

What about the Americans brutalized and killed by illegal-alien criminals?

If Jeffries and his party succeed in chipping away at ICE, more Americans like 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman will die.

The man charged with her murder is a Venezuelan national who was breaking the law just by being in this country — yet the enforcement necessary to keep killers like him out, or send them back promptly if they do get through our borders, is what Democrats aim to dismantle.

Illegal alien criminals, not law-enforcement officers, are the threat to ordinary Americans’ lives and well-being, but Jeffries and his fellow Democrats choose to demonize ICE.

They’re beholden to a left-wing activist base that wants little less than open borders, as the immigration crisis brought about by the last Democratic administration showed.

Voters repudiated that agenda, but the election of Trump on a platform of serious immigration enforcement hasn’t chastised Jeffries or his Senate counterpart Chuck Schumer — they’re determined to take the country back to the Joe Biden era, when the likes of Gorman’s killer could enter with ease.

Yet what Dems didn’t foresee is that Trump would repair their sabotage of America’s transportation security by using the very agency Jeffries and company are trying to destroy.

ICE is proving to be doubly invaluable now — for its primary task of immigration enforcement but also as a fallback for TSA when Democrats play shutdown games with Homeland Security.

The only risk to travelers is that leftist provocateurs will attempt to manufacture conflict to besmirch ICE — a strategy they employed to deadly effect in Minneapolis.

Yet the country can’t give in to intimidation if innocent lives like Gorman’s or Laken Riley’s are to be saved.

Jeffries and Schumer may not plot their tactics over the phone with anti-ICE street activists, but they’re working from the same playbook: create tense, frustrating, even dangerous situations, then channel the resulting outrage against law enforcement.

It’s true ICE agents can’t substitute for trained TSA personnel in providing for all an airport’s security needs.

But they can cover the basics, while remaining TSA employees — whom Democrats refuse to pay during the standoff — handle the specialized work.

And if Jeffries and Schumer still won’t budge?

How long before even the most selfless TSA worker can’t afford to eat, or pay rent, because of the Democrats’ stunt?

ICE is funded separately from the rest of DHS, including TSA, which is why Dems can’t attack immigration enforcement directly.

And ICE is set up to hire quickly — so if Democrats keep Homeland Security and TSA shut down, Trump might have another way to rescue the travelers and government workers who are all Schumer’s hostages.

The president could hire the best TSA workers straight into ICE, immediately acquiring the skills necessary for the enforcement agency to run airport security indefinitely.

And if anti-ICE activists attempt any mischief, the president has other possibilities at hand — he’s already contemplated putting the National Guard in airports.

Law enforcement of every kind, but especially immigration enforcement, has been vilified for years in liberal media, which has taken a toll on public opinion.

Vilifying the armed forces isn’t so easy, and progressive propagandists haven’t tried it to nearly the same extent.

Congressional Democrats think of our airports the way Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps thinks about the Strait of Hormuz: as a chokepoint to get a chokehold on America and force concessions.

What Schumer and Jeffries are doing would be unconscionable at any time, but in wartime defunding homeland security is more than malicious; it’s potentially deadly.

The Democrats should cut their losses. Thanks to President Trump’s ingenuity and perseverance, they’ve already lost their war with law enforcement.

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