Lauren Boebert called out for fabricating ICE airport statistics

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) made a head-turning claim on X Monday about how President Donald Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement deployment to airports is already producing results — but this claim turned out to be a fabrication on multiple levels.

"You can’t make this stuff up!!" wrote Boebert. "ICE agents show up at airports, and suddenly TSA wait times in Minneapolis drop to less than five minutes! Called it!!" She accompanied her post with a video of herself saying more or less the same thing.

But this soon prompted a response from Billy Binion, a reporter with the libertarian magazine Reason.

"'You can’t make this stuff up!!' is a funny way to start this because Lauren Boebert did, in fact, make this stuff up," wrote Binion. "ICE agents are not at the Minneapolis airport, where TSA lines have been consistently quick."

"We are living in an episode of Veep," he added.

TSA staffing has plummeted to critical levels as a result of the ongoing shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, which has no end in sight as Democrats demand civil rights and accountability reforms to ICE to fund the agency, and Trump refuses suggestions by Senate Republicans to fund ICE separately so the rest of DHS, including the TSA, can be funded.

Trump's move to deploy ICE agents to select airports, which reportedly originated from a random person from Arizona he saw call into Fox News with the idea, has been met with outrage, given that the agents are not trained to process people through security lines, and their potential utility in assisting overwhelmed TSA workers is minimal.