Screening lines at some of America’s busiest airports stretched for hours on Monday — wrapping through terminals, past baggage claims, and out onto the curb — as unpaid TSA agents stopped showing up to work and Donald Trump’s answer was to deploy armed immigration agents to stand around and watch.

TSA agents missed their second paycheck on Friday. Hundreds have reportedly quit. Many more simply aren’t coming in, because — and this shouldn’t require explanation — people don’t work for free.

The Department of Homeland Security remains partially shut down thanks to a budget impasse. Democratic lawmakers are demanding accountability for ICE after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and after a pattern of warrantless detentions and militarized raids that have rattled communities across the country. Congressional Republicans have refused to budge. TSA workers are caught in the middle, earning roughly $40,000 a year and now earning exactly $0.

Trump’s solution? Send ICE agents to airports in 11 cities — Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Fort Myers, New Orleans, and the three big New York-area airports — to “assist with passenger screening,” according to CNN.

In Atlanta, that assistance looked like dozens of unmasked ICE agents standing in clusters behind passengers, watching crowds. Not screening anybody. Not moving any lines.

At Hartsfield-Jackson, people hoping to make mid-morning flights had been in line since before sunrise. Dr. Paul Brown, president of the Phillips School of Theology, was an hour into his wait when he started shouting: “Pay these people! Help explain to me that the congresspeople — they’re getting paid on time regularly, no problem. But these people who work for $40,000 a year, you’re holding them up over some politics.”

Brown scoffed at the idea that ICE agents would be useful. “They’re part of the problem,” he said.

Trump, naturally, had a different read on why his agents were really at airports. He claimed Monday morning that ICE could now “arrest illegals as they come into the country. That’s very fertile territory.” But, he added, they were there to help.

The quiet part, as always, said out loud.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens relayed that federal officials said ICE personnel would handle “line management and crowd control” and that the deployment was “not intended to conduct immigration enforcement activities.”

NAACP national president Derrick Johnson was not reassured. “Trump’s secret police are now stationed at airport checkpoints,” he said. “They are inadequately trained, armed, and instructed to profile people based on race and accent. What could possibly go wrong?”

Johnson pointed out that Republicans in Congress had tanked a proposal to actually pay TSA agents. “This is a deliberate decision,” he said. “It’s not a bandaid for a lapse in funding.”

That’s the thing worth sitting with. Congress could pay TSA workers tomorrow. They could fund the agency, reopen the lines, and let trained screeners do the job they were hired for. Instead, TSA agents are broke, airports are in chaos, and armed immigration agents with no screening training are standing in terminals across the country.

Members of Congress, of course, are still getting their paychecks on time.