When Juan joined the Transportation Security Administration, or T.S.A., about seven years ago, he wasn’t sure how long he could afford to stay. He was assigned to staff the screening checkpoint and inspect bags at Palm Springs International Airport, an indoor-outdoor facility at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains, a few hours’ drive east of Los Angeles. He had thought that any position within the federal government would provide stability and a living wage, but he was given only part-time hours. His pay was so low that he had to live with his parents and work a second job. His supervisors seemed eager to write him up for small mistakes. All that grief just “to be a meat shield,” he said. He was trained on the floor in Palm Springs and at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in southeastern Georgia, alongside Border Patrol agents, corrections officers, and F.B.I. officers. Even there, the T.S.A. was something of an “ugly-stepchild agency,” Juan, whose real name I’ve withheld for privacy, told me.

Juan was a young child when the T.S.A. was created as part of the George W. Bush Administration’s panicked response to 9/11. By autumn of 2002, some fifty-five thousand transportation security officers, or T.S.O.s, were screening airplane passengers for the T.S.A. They began as private contractors but were soon converted to federal employees, and, in 2003, the T.S.A. was absorbed by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s easy to hate the agency for making air travel inconvenient. At recent “Hands Off!” protests against Elon Musk’s DOGE and in support of federal workers, I’ve yet to spot a sign paying tribute to the T.S.A. And yet, in 2023, for instance, T.S.O.s intercepted nearly seven thousand firearms, ninety-three per cent of which were loaded. Juan believed that prevention, a lack of big news, was proof of success. He often thought about Richard Reid, who had tried to detonate a “shoe bomb” midair, a few months after 9/11. The subsequent removal and screening of shoes has stopped someone from “trying that same exact thing again,” Juan said.

Even after the T.S.A. was moved under D.H.S., the agency’s workers had far fewer rights than other federal employees. T.S.O.s could not collectively bargain; their wages and benefits were closer to those in fast food or retail than in the G.S. (general schedule) system, the main federal pay scale. This naturally led to a grumpy staff. “That’s why we have such a bad reputation amongst the public,” Juan said. In fiscal year 2004, the rate of attrition for T.S.O.s was twenty-four per cent, compared with 7.5 per cent in Homeland Security as a whole. After numerous attempts, efforts to organize a union finally succeeded in 2011. Juan joined a Southern California branch of the American Federation of Government Employees (A.F.G.E.) union, Local 1260, which covered some twenty-six hundred T.S.O.s, from LAX and Orange County’s John Wayne Airport down to San Diego. “The union was optional,” he said, “but my gut told me it was the right thing to do.”

In 2019, during a monthlong federal shutdown, T.S.O.s, like air-traffic controllers, were forced to work without pay. Juan was still part-time, but he was cushioned by the fact that he was living with his parents. Some of his fellow-T.S.O.s couldn’t afford the gas or child care they needed to commute. There were labor shortages at airports across the country. A T.S.A. official warned that security operations had been “adversely impacted” at Palm Springs and threatened to punish workers who called in sick. Then came the hardship of the pandemic: erratic work hours, high rates of COVID. Juan contracted the virus multiple times. In 2022, Alejandro Mayorkas, President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, and David Pekoske, whom President Trump had appointed to lead the T.S.A., expanded the rights of T.S.O.s. Their pay scale started to approach that of other federal employees. Juan, who was by then working full time, saw his salary jump from fortysomething thousand dollars to nearly seventy thousand.

Last year, the T.S.O. union, A.F.G.E., signed a seven-year collective-bargaining agreement that provided better rights to sick leave and a streamlined grievance process for fifty thousand workers. (Uneven discipline, and limited options to appeal, had continued to affect morale.) Around the same time, the bipartisan Rights for the T.S.A. Workforce Act was introduced in Congress to confer full federal protections. “It did feel like we were finally in a place where we were valued, like what we did actually mattered,” Juan said. And so, even after the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 recommended that the T.S.A. “be privatized” and “deunionized,” and after Trump won a second term, Juan didn’t worry about his job. “I figured our C.B.A. was solid.”

But then Trump entered office and immediately fired Pekoske. In February, the new leadership of the T.S.A. dictated that “transgender officers shall no longer perform pat-downs on travelers,” given Trump’s executive order on the “biological truth” of gender. T.S.O.s were also frustrated by an unexplained delay in getting their annual allotment of uniforms, which they needed in order to conform to the “big focus on professionalism,” Juan told me. On March 7th, he was on an early-morning shift when a co-worker pointed to an e-mail and said, “Hey, what’s going on with this?” The Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, had issued a memo titled “Supporting the TSA Workforce by Removing a Union That Harms Transportation Security Officers.” The memo nullified the 2024 union contract and denied T.S.O.s the right to choose a representative “for the purposes of collective bargaining or for any other purposes.” She stated that unionization had “solely benefited the American Federation of Government Employees” and undermined “TSA’s critical mission to protect the transportation system and keep Americans safe.” Juan called his union steward and said, “You’d better call Bobby”—meaning Bobby Orozco, the president of the local. “You’d better figure out what the hell’s going on, because we’re screwed.”

There were immediate changes at Palm Springs airport. In the workers’ break room, managers stripped the dedicated union bulletin board and removed the binders containing the collective-bargaining agreement. The water cooler in the checked-baggage area was no longer being refilled. The contract had allowed T.S.O.s to wear shorts instead of pants during the summer and when the outside temperature rose above seventy degrees; shorts were now prohibited, even in the California desert. Juan was informed of a new attendance policy: any T.S.O. who had to call in sick, even for one day, would be required to provide a doctor’s note. But who could obtain such a note within hours of waking up with the flu or a back spasm? “A lot of this is engineered to basically trap you into getting writeups and suspensions,” Juan said. A memo from the T.S.A.’s human-resources department further clarified that employees facing such discipline had “no right to request representation.”

The rate of union membership among public-sector workers has long been five times that of workers in the private sector. And collective-bargaining agreements, combined with the civil-rights laws of the nineteen-sixties, have insured that government workers are treated fairly and can’t be fired without cause. “There’s a lot of very unhappy people right now,” Juan said. On March 13th, the A.F.G.E. sued the Trump Administration for unlawfully rescinding T.S.A.’s collective-bargaining agreement. Two weeks later, Trump cancelled the union contracts for other workers at the Department of Homeland Security, as well as at the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, and more, spurring additional lawsuits. Since taking office, Trump has sought to de-unionize nearly a million federal employees, who can now be fired at will. (A judge temporarily blocked him from de-unionizing a fraction of those workers last week.) “Of all the federal agencies, we’re probably the most well-equipped, mentally, because we’ve been here before,” Orozco, Local 1260’s president and a T.S.O. at LAX, told me. Meanwhile, the Republican senators Tommy Tuberville, of Alabama, and Mike Lee, of Utah, introduced a bill to “abolish” the T.S.A. and to outsource its duties to private contractors. Juan believes that privatization would lead to poor working conditions and disinvestment in machines and maintenance. “You can’t cut staff without sacrificing either wait times or security effectiveness,” he said. “That’s impossible.”

On a recent weekday, Juan woke up at 2:30 A.M., showered, and put on his uniform—a blue short-sleeved shirt, his badge and shoulder boards with the T.S.A. insignia, black cargo pants, and black boots. He grabbed an orange energy drink before starting his hourlong commute to the airport. He should have gone to bed before sunset, but had stayed up too late and was sleepy. It was pitch-dark and silent outside; the desert sand that had collected on his windshield dissipated as he backed out of the driveway.

The T.S.O.s at Palm Springs work staggered shifts, between 3:30 A.M. and 7:30 P.M., during “season.” In the hundred-plus-degree off-season, which runs from June through October, workers take leave or accept temporary assignments at airports in cooler regions. It was late April, after the various tourist-season peaks: a P.G.A. golf tournament, tennis at Indian Wells, Coachella. There were still marines going to and from the desert training center at Twentynine Palms, and Canadian retirees, or snowbirds, a major driver of the local economy. But, all over town, Canadians were selling their homes. Trump’s tariffs, immigration requirements, and threats to colonize their country had pushed them to leave. WestJet and Flair Airlines ended their seasonal service to Winnipeg and Vancouver earlier than usual, owing to “the current operating environment and shifts in demand,” a Palm Springs airport spokesperson told a local news station. The rattled city hung red “PALM SPRINGS ♥️ CANADA” signs, with the maple-leaf flag nested inside the heart, along the downtown strip and throughout the airport.

At the screening checkpoint, all seven security lanes were open. They were crowded with suntanned older couples, athletes, vacationing families, and small perfumed dogs. Juan cycled through various roles during his eight-hour shift. He gave instructions at the conveyor belt, led people through the hands-up advanced-imaging-technology scanner, and examined bags going through the X-ray machine. “The X-ray—it’s mentally engaging,” Juan told me. “You get an image, and your job is to figure out, Is this a good bag or a bad bag? And you don’t have very long to figure it out.” Throughout the years, he’d seen everything from grenade shells to “the craziest sex toys you can imagine.” There were always new rules (bocce balls, but not bowling balls, are O.K. in a carry-on) and new technologies. “The threat is dynamic,” Juan said. “The people who make these decisions hold a clearance, so they might not be able to share with us something that’s happened. Tomorrow, they could say, ‘No laptops are allowed, period.’ And we’re not going to know why. We just have to enforce it.”