Airports and alcohol often don’t mix: TPA sees increase of intoxicated, disorderly passengers
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TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Increasingly, Tampa International Airport police are dealing with intoxicated passengers.
The Federal Aviation Administration has a zero-tolerance policy for passengers who disrupt flights, but often, intoxicated passengers don’t even make it onto the planes and that’s when airport police get involved.
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Drunk passengers can face fines, arrest and even be banned from flying completely.
Several videos, recorded by police body warn cameras at TPA show passengers who’ve had too much to drink at the airport.
The FAA keeps track of unruly passengers.
More than a thousand incidents were recorded in 2019. The number spiked to 5,973 incidents in 2021 when people were angry about wearing masks on planes and in terminals. In 2023, the FAA recorded 2,075 incidents of unruly passengers.
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“The airport is a very stressful place. You may be delayed several hours, you may be running late and then you throw in some alcohol and that’s a recipe for disaster sometimes,” said Tampa International Airport Police Chief Charlie Vazquez.
The Chief pointed out that TPA had more than 24 million passengers, and there are relatively few incidents that end in arrests.
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“The vast majority of them, the passenger gets rebooked, bring ’em back land side and they get rebooked for a later flight,” said Vazquez.
However, some passengers get out of control when they’ve had too much to drink and those incidents do end in arrest.
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“Of course, they can be arrested, charged with disorderly intoxication,” said Vazquez. “Sometimes those disorderly intoxications rise to the level of a peace officer, which you don’t want that.”
He says, the airlines can prevent someone from boarding an aircraft if they think they are intoxicated.
“At the very least, you won’t catch that flight. If you escalate where you need to be taken in the Marchman Act, or you are arrested for disorderly conduct and assault, well then if you escalate beyond that you may get placed on a no-fly list, maybe forever,” said Vazquez.
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Government shutdown ends after 4 days as Trump signs bipartisan funding compromise
At times, it appeared that Congress could be on track for another lengthy stalemate, but a deal reached last week allowed lawmakers to break the logjam.
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The partial government shutdown ended Tuesday afternoon when President Trump signed a bipartisan funding compromise to reopen the government a few hours after it had been approved by the House of Representatives. That agreement helped bring the shutdown to a close on its fourth day and set up further debate over the Department of Homeland Security’s budget.
This most recent shutdown was a far cry from the record-setting 43-day standoff that ground Washington, D.C., to a halt late last year. But the path to making this such a brief funding lapse was far from smooth.
Early last week, Democrats in the Senate insisted that they would block any bill that provided any additional funding to DHS — the department that oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
After days of uncertainty, Trump announced that he had reached a compromise with Democrats that would allow the bill to move forward. That agreement was approved by the Senate hours before Friday’s funding deadline, but the government still shut down over the weekend because the bill had not yet been passed by the House.
When Congress adjourned for the weekend, there was optimism on Capitol Hill that the House might be able to quickly pass the bill and get the government back open as early as Monday. But that confidence quickly eroded as a small number of hard-line Republican representatives threatened to sink it if their own policy priorities weren’t satisfied.
Trump made it clear on Monday that he wanted the shutdown over as soon as possible.
“I am working hard with [House] Speaker [Mike] Johnson to get the current funding deal … through the House and to my desk, where I will sign it into Law, IMMEDIATELY! “ he wrote on Truth Social. “There can be NO CHANGES at this time.
In the end, combined pressure from Republican leadership and Trump convinced a handful of GOP defectors to drop their objections and allow the plan to move forward. The House gave the funding bill final approval early Tuesday afternoon in a 217-214 vote, sending the legislation to Trump’s desk.
How we got here
The historically long shutdown that began in October impacted the entire government. When that standoff finally ended, most of the government was funded for only a few months, setting the stage for the more recent, partial shutdown, which has left many agencies unaffected.
Rather than try to pass one massive bill to fund the whole government with Friday’s deadline approaching, congressional leaders opted to split the legislation into three pieces and pass them individually. Two of the bills — including funding for the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Justice and Interior — made it through both chambers of Congress and were signed into law a couple of weeks ago. The third bill looked to be on a similar path, but that changed after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis on Jan. 24.
That shooting was the second deadly shooting by immigration officers in the city in less than three weeks. Afterward, Senate Democrats insisted that they would not allow any bill that provides more funding to DHS to go through unless it includes new reforms, including a ban on agents wearing masks and a higher standard for warrants used in raids.
Republicans haven’t agreed to those reforms. Instead, they signed on to a deal that provides long-term funding for all of the government except DHS, giving lawmakers more time to discuss reforms and provide funding to the department. The Senate passed that agreement on Friday, sending it to the House for final approval on Tuesday.
Since Saturday, critical parts of the government — like the departments of Defense, Transportation, Labor and Homeland Security — had been shut down.
What about Homeland Security?
Even though Congress has solved its immediate problem of getting the government back open, Democrats and Republicans have only 10 days to debate reforms to the Trump administration’s immigration policies before the department runs out of money again. Based on recent comments from leaders on both sides, that may prove to be a very tough hill to climb.
“I think it’s likely that the next two weeks surrounding putting together a DHS budget will have all of the efficiency of an eighth-grade car wash,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy told reporters on Friday.
On Sunday, Johnson told Fox News that one of the Democrats’ primary demands — that immigration agents show their faces and wear identification — was effectively a nonstarter for his caucus. Some Republicans have also said they are strongly opposed to requiring ICE and CBP officials to get a warrant signed by a judge before entering a private home, a standard that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called “a condition of moving forward.”
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Many Democrats seem to believe that the list of reforms put forward by their party leadership doesn’t go far enough.
“What could we do to overhaul them? Let me start: new leadership; stopping these surges across the country — not just in my state; training them like they were supposed to be trained; … mandatory body cameras; stopping ramming into people’s houses without a judicial warrant, and I could go on,” Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar told NBC News late last month.
A number of Democrats have also said they will vote to fund DHS only if key figures behind Trump’s immigration agenda, specifically Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and top White House aide Stephen Miller, are fired.
Any compromise on DHS, if it’s reached, would have to be approved by both chambers of Congress. Congressional leaders have conceded that it would be challenging to complete that process before the department’s funding lapses again.
“I just think it’s going to be really, really hard to get anything done … even if there’s an agreement,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.
ICE and CBP may still be able to weather any funding lapse because of the $43 billion in additional money they received from the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill last summer. Other parts of DHS, most notably the TSA and federal disaster relief programs, don’t have that kind of financial backstop.View comments(3.3k)
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Congressman Reads Texts From Border Agent Who Bragged About Shooting Chicago Woman: ‘5 Shots, 7 Holes’
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https://s.yimg.com/rx/ev/builds/1.14.75/pframe.htmlKey takeawaysPowered by Yahoo Scout. Yahoo is using AI to generate key points from this article. This means the info may not always match what’s in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.
- Rep. Robert Garcia read text messages from an immigration agent who bragged about shooting a Chicago woman last year during a congressional hearing.
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In a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) read aloud text messages from an immigration agent who bragged about shooting a Chicago woman last year.
On Oct. 4, Customs and Border Protection agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez five times in Brighton Park during the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Midway Blitz, an immigration crackdown. DHS claimed Martinez had rammed Exum and other agents, which prompted them “to fire defensively.” The Department of Justice indicted Martinez, but ultimately the charges were dismissed after the government admitted in court that the ramming had not occurred.
On Tuesday, House Democrats held a hearing about the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in places such as Chicago and Minnesota. Martinez gave a harrowing account of the incident.
“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave.”
Later in the hearing, Garcia read texts from Exum about the shooting. The messages were displayed on placards behind him:
Ms. Martinez, these are images of texts sent by the agent who shot you. And they’re actually disturbing to read, but I think it’s important for the public to see this. The agent linked an article about your shooting and texted, “Read it. 5 shots, 7 holes. I fired 7 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys… Oh, well, it is what it is. Sh*t happens.”
This is someone that works for the United States government.
The hearing also featured testimony from Luke Granger and Brent Granger, the brothers of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross last month in Minneapolis. Two weeks after her killing, Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez shot and killed Alex Pretti in the city.
Watch above via MS NOW.
The post Congressman Reads Texts From Border Agent Who Bragged About Shooting Chicago Woman: ‘5 Shots, 7 Holes’ first appeared on Mediaite.View comments(160)
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Mike Johnson Jumps Aboard Trump’s Rigged Elections Bandwagon: ‘Can I Prove That? No’
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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) suggested that three 2024 congressional elections may have been rigged against the GOP while speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
During an interview with former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino on Monday, President Donald Trump — who has long claimed that he and his party have been held back by election fraud without furnishing any hard evidence — called for a federal takeover of elections.
“These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” Trump told Bongino. “And it’s amazing the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places.’”
“The Republicans oughta nationalize the voting,” he added.
On Tuesday, Johnson advocated for the passage of the SAVE Act, which would require voters across the country to provide “documentary proof” that they are American citizens when they register to vote. The president’s comments were then raised by a reporter who asked if Johnson agreed that Republicans should “nationalize elections,” and whether he has “confidence in how elections are conducted right now heading into the midterm.”
Johnson replied:
We have thoughtful debate about our election system every election cycle and sometimes in between. We know it’s in our system the states have been in charge of administering their elections. What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections. We need constant improvement on that front.
I don’t know what the ultimate solution is going to be. I’m not going to get ahead of the negotiations here, but I think that is something that’s going to be a continuing theme here. It’s something that we’ll continue to push. And we hope the governors will insist upon that same thing as well. In some of the states, like in California, for example, I mean they hold the elections open for weeks after Election Day. That’s just one thing that bothers so many people. We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle. And every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. And no series of ballots that were counted after Election Day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts. It just-, it looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream, but we need more confidence, and the American people in the election system, and it’s essential. And everybody, no matter what party you’re in, should agree with that.
The, you know, mass mailing of paper ballots, of mail-in ballots, and all the other irregularities that have haunted us over the last couple cycles, we need to tighten that up. Now, the red states have done a lot of good work in that front, but it’s the blue states that I’m frankly concerned about. So, we’ll see how the law is modified and what’s changed, but I hope we can get consensus to get that done.
During the early years of the Biden administration, Democrats pushed for a federal elections takeover of their own that would have banned voter ID nationwide, among numerous other controversial provisions.
After the 2020 presidential election, which Trump falsely claimed to have won, Johnson promoted the conspiracy theory that voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems had changed votes for Trump into votes for Joe Biden.
“The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” said Johnson in 2020. On January 6, 2021, Johnson objected to the Democratic electors from two states hours after the infamous Capitol riot delayed the certification of the election results.
Watch above via Newsmax.
