Sonia Labosco, the executive director of the Air Marshal National council, warned President Joe Biden’s administration that air travel is “becoming less safe” since he is sending them to the border.
The Air Marshals have been tasked with “Hospital Watch, Transportation, Law Enforcement Searches, Welfare Checks, and Entry Control.”
Labosco wants Biden to stop sending Air Marshals to the border, especially since air travel will become busier due to the holidays.
From Fox News:
“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 just demolishing our chances at stopping another 9/11.”Labosco said Americans will suffer because many believe they’re safe in the presence of a trained air marshal, but “they’re just simply not.”Labosco said marshals feel “torn” about being at the southern border while not doing the job they were trained to do.”They have a humanitarian heart. We empathize with what’s happening at the border as human beings. However, it does not take away the responsibility or the oath that we have as air marshals to protect our aviation domain.”
Labosco said the council hadn’t heard back from Biden. The board sent Biden another letter this weekend because marshals encountered Level Four and Level Three incidents.
“Level four means that they tried to breach the cockpit,” explained Labosco. “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.”
Biden redeployed the Air Marshals earlier this month:
“As part of a DHS wide effort, (LE/FAMS) has been called upon to redeploy Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) to the Southwest Border,” Tirrell Stevenson, Executive Assistant Administrator and Director of the Transportation Security Administration’s Law Enforcement/Federal Air Marshal Service wrote to Air Marshals in a November 14 email shared with the Herald.According to Stevenson’s email, it may be “operationally necessary” to assign deployments to Air Marshals from “all field offices and Headquarters assignments” despite a history of some Marshals voluntarily assisting Border Patrol agents.“A transparent, equitable and consistent selection process and deployment plan has been developed and agreed to by all LE/FAMS Supervisory Air Marshals in Charge,” Stevenson wrote.
David Londo, the council’s president, told The Boston Herald that he filed a complaint because sending Air Marshals to the border “is both a waste of their ‘highly specialized’ training and a violation of the law.” More from The Boston Herald:
Pekoske and Stevenson are sending Marshals to El Paso, Laredo, and McAllen, Texas, as well as San Diego, California and Yuma, Arizona, according to Londo. While there, he told the Inspector General, Marshals are performing “Hospital Watch, Transportation, Law Enforcement Searches, Welfare Checks, and Entry Control.”“The agency documents never describe or mention that these duties have any relation to TSA’s core mission of transportation security. Instead, the duties relate to assisting migrants who have crossed the border into the United States,” he wrote.
The border is out of control. Migrant encounters grow each month, consistently setting new records. Migrants are abandoning dogs at the border.
Human trafficking. Drug trafficking, especially with fentanyl.
What a mess.
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