What did Donald Trump do today?

He lashed out at Americans he hates in the only way he knows how to anymore.

Employees of the Transportation Safety Administration have been working without pay since February 14 as a result of a partial government shutdown. The key issue is funding for ICE, which Trump has used as a personal strike force to harass or kill Americans he regards as his enemies—which is to say, Democrats or anyone who lives in areas that elected Democrats. (That's not hyperbole: just yesterday, he specifically identified the entire Democratic party, amounting to about half of the country, as the greatest enemy of "America.")

As a result, 400 TSA employees have quit and many more have been forced to call out rather than waste working hours on a job they're not being paid for. Democrats have introduced legislation to fund the TSA, which Republicans blocked on orders from Trump. The result has been a crippling shutdown today at airports like Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson, normally the busiest airport in the world. Waits to get through security checkpoints were stretching past six hours by midday today.

Trump's response to the crisis was to say he'd deploy ICE agents to the affected airports tomorrow. But Trump, who has not flown on a commercial airline since the 1980s, specifically mentioned using them to target immigrants and, "with heavy emphasis," Americans of Somali heritage "like no one has ever seen before."

Undocumented immigrants don't use airports (except to leave the United States) and it is flatly unconstitutional to target people for arrest because of their race or national origin.

The security screening line at Atlanta's Hartfield-Jackson International Airport today, which went all the way down to the baggage claim area below the main arrivals floor.

The issue Trump's threat raises isn't whether this is a good idea: nobody, from elected officials to TSA representatives to travelers, thinks it is. Operating scanners, working with the TSA computer system, and even handling basic everyday interactions requires at least some training that ICE agents won't know any more about than the passengers they'd be dealing with. There isn't even a police function they can take over: virtually no TSA employees are law enforcement officers, and most encounters requiring that kind of intervention are handled by local police departments. 

It's also entirely possible that no such force will materialize at all, or just a handful for publicity purposes. If Trump's deployment of the National Guard to "fight crime" in the cities he was politically targeting is any guide, ICE agents may find themselves doing landscaping work outside airports rather than anything related to security inside them.

The problem is that this is another example of Trump using ICE as a private paramilitary force he can use to threaten violence against people who—like, for example, Americans of a certain race or ethnicity—are by definition doing nothing wrong by traveling. Somali-Americans are not the reason why TSA employees are walking off the job: Trump's refusal to sign a bill authorizing funding for the TSA is. 

Collective punishment of innocents to put pressure on the people he imagines are his enemies is something of a theme for Trump lately. He's also promised to bomb civilian power plants in Iran, an unambiguous war crime, starting Monday evening if it doesn't end its thus-far successful blockade of the Persian Gulf. 

Why does this matter?

• Nobody who thinks of tens of millions of Americans as "the greatest enemy of America" is fit to hold office.  

• This is happening because Trump wants it to.

• Gutter racism won't solve this problem.