Air marshals are protecting just 1 percent of flights across the United States after the Biden administration redeployed hundreds of officers on humanitarian missions on the Southern border, the Air Marshal National Council president Sonia Labosco has claimed.
Prior to being redeployed on the border to drive vans full of migrants or handing out water, federal air marshals were protecting around 5 percent of flights, itself a cause of concern for Labosco, who spoke with Fox News earlier this week.
“Let’s stop another 9/11, we are extremely concerned,” Labosco said. Referencing a recent incident in which a Southwest Airlines passenger allegedly attempted to breach the cockpit in a major security alert, Labosco warned: “There have been numerous in the last two weeks [including] a Level 4 threat”.
“Sir, please, replace the air marshals on the border, stop taking them out the skies and let us do the job we are trained to do,” Labosco pleaded in comments directed at President Biden.
“These ground-based duties that they are pulling us out of the skies to go to the border are just demolishing our chances of stopping another 9/11”.
The Department for Homeland Security and the Transporation Security Administration say they “hear the concerns” of its air marshal workforce, but the agencies have refused to give a timeline for when the ground deployments might end.
Some federal air marshals are being sent to the Southern border on mandatory 21-day deployments, with officers dispatched to El Paso in Texas and Yuma, Arizona. The mandatory deployments began at the end of October after the Biden administration admitted it was “experiencing a surge in irregular migration along the Southwest border”.
Last week, a man was arrested after he allegedly held a cut-throat razor to the neck of a female passenger on a jetBlue flight after she tried to watch a movie on the inflight entertainment system.
And in another alarming incident, a man allegedly threatened flight attendants with a box cutter that he managed to smuggle aboard a Frontier flight forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing so that law enforcement could remove the suspect.
