Part of The Access Shift — an ongoing series examining how access is being quietly reshaped across American life.
When SSC previously reported on ICE’s expanding presence inside airport operations, the story was about a quiet but significant shift — immigration enforcement moving out of border contexts and into the everyday infrastructure of travel itself, embedding within systems most Americans experience as routine and neutral. What was operational and largely unannounced then is now being stated directly, as federal policy posture, by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has suggested that the federal government could remove customs agents from airports in sanctuary cities if local governments do not cooperate with immigration enforcement priorities. The framing is negotiation. The mechanics are considerably more consequential. Without customs officers, international flights cannot be processed. No processing means no arrivals. No arrivals means that cities with major international airports — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, among others — would be effectively cut off from global travel, not through a formal ban, not through legislation, but through a staffing decision made at the administrative level by a cabinet official. The infrastructure remains. The people who make it function are simply withdrawn.
The scale of that disruption is not theoretical and should not be treated as a bluff. International travel to the United States generated more than $180 billion in visitor spending in 2024, according to the U.S. Travel Association, supporting millions of jobs tied to tourism, hospitality, business travel, and local economies. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each process tens of millions of international passengers annually. The airports in question are not peripheral to these cities’ economies. They are among the primary mechanisms through which those economies connect to the world. Interrupting that flow would not inconvenience travelers. It would stall economic movement at the scale these cities depend on to function — and the communities absorbing that economic disruption first would not be corporate travelers with flexible itineraries. They would be the hospitality workers, the ground crews, the small business operators, the immigrant-owned restaurants and car services and hotels whose revenue depends on the volume of people moving through.
The cities named are also not random. They are global entry points where mobility connects directly to institutional power in ways that extend far beyond individual travelers. Universities in New York and Chicago depend on international student enrollment as a primary revenue stream. Research hospitals depend on global talent pipelines that move through these airports. Corporations route executives, clients, and capital through these hubs daily. International cultural institutions, diplomatic functions, and trade relationships all depend on the uninterrupted operation of the customs infrastructure Mullin is now positioning as leverage. To threaten that access is not simply to pressure local governments. It is to apply coercive force to entire ecosystems — academic, medical, commercial, cultural — built on the assumption that global connectivity is a stable feature of American life in these cities.
What this moment clarifies is the mechanism through which access is increasingly being governed. It is not restricted through formal bans that require legislative action, judicial review, or public debate. It is managed through operations — staffing decisions, enforcement priorities, resource allocation, the quiet withdrawal of personnel from infrastructure that only functions because those personnel are present. Remove the customs officers, and the system stops. The outcome is functionally identical to a restriction, but it requires no new law, generates no formal record of a ban, and can be reversed or reimposed at administrative discretion. It is access as a dial, turned by whoever controls the staffing.
That pattern is already visible across the travel infrastructure SSC has been documenting. Airport security delays stretch into hours for some travelers while others bypass them through paid programs like TSA PreCheck and CLEAR. Enforcement visibility shifts who is scrutinized and who moves freely. The experience of the same airport, the same terminal, the same system, is radically different depending on documentation status, income, and how a traveler is perceived by the personnel they encounter. Access does not disappear all at once. It becomes uneven, then conditional, then — in a moment like this one — explicitly negotiable, stated openly by a federal official as a tool of political leverage.
That is what makes this proposal significant beyond its immediate policy context. A Secretary of Homeland Security has publicly framed access to global mobility as something that can be turned on or off in a political dispute with a city government. Infrastructure that has long been treated as essential — that businesses, universities, hospitals, and families have built their operations around as a stable assumption — is being repositioned as contingent on local political compliance. Once that repositioning is stated openly, it cannot be unstated. The baseline assumption of stability has shifted. What was once guaranteed has been named, by the federal government itself, as conditional. And once access becomes conditional at that scale, the question is no longer just who gets through the airport. It is who decides whether the system stays open at all, under what terms, and at whose expense when it does not.