Marshals Diverted from Commercial Aircraft to Quell Border Crisis

The Air Marshal National Council provides members—primarily U.S. Air Marshals—a united voice by which to articulate priority issues to lawmakers and authorities within and without the Federal Air Marshal Service.

On Monday, 28 November 2022, the organization’s executive director, Sonia Labosco, called on the Biden administration to stop deploying air marshals to southern U.S. states for purpose of helping control the unprecedented influx of illegal aliens resultant of lax Democrat immigration policy and Biden’s own duplicitous campaign promise  to open the U.S.’s southern border outright.

Labosco unequivocally warned that air-travel is becoming increasingly unsafe as marshals are diverted from their duties aboard commercial flights and sent to Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico to apprehend skulking coyotes, vulpine border-crossers, and dope-laden mules.

Addressing Americans’ widespread perception that air marshals are present on many, if not most commercial airline flights, Labosco stated: "they're just simply not."

"We have been decimated,” Labosco deplored. “We have been depleted. We're on less than one-percent of flights. These ground-based duties that they're pulling us out of the sky to go to the border are just demolishing our chances at stopping another 9/11."

Labosco described air marshals as feeling "torn" about being dispatched to the southern border instead of doing the job for which they were trained. "They have a humanitarian heart,” she asserted. “We empathize with what's happening at the border as human beings. However, it does not take away the responsibility or the oath that we have as air marshals to protect our aviation domain."

Whether or not the Biden administration chooses to acknowledge the collective concerns of more than three-thousand air marshals remains to be seen. "We actually wrote him [Biden] another letter over the weekend because we had a level-four and a level-three incident,” Labosco confided. “Level-four means that they tried to breach the cockpit. Level-three, we had two of those, which means there were life-threatening behaviors on one of those aircraft. An individual had a straight razor to a passenger's throat. So these are very serious incidents."

The latter event to which Labosco referred occurred 21 November 2022 aboard JetBlue flight 871 from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to Utah’s Salt Lake City International Airport (SLC). During subject flight—according to a federal criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Utah—passenger Merrill Darrell Fackrell, 41, of Syracuse, Utah, placed his hand before the seatback screen of the woman beside whom he was seated and instructed her to pause the movie she was viewing. The woman removed her headphones and realized Fackrell was clutching a straight-razor to her throat. Perceiving the air of anomaly but unaware of the blade or the peril into which his wife had fallen, the woman’s husband left his seat to alert the JetBlue cabin crew. The woman, meanwhile, lunged for the aircraft’s aisle, escaping her assailant, albeit not before he took hold of her shoulder in a last-ditch attempt to restrain her.

Shaken but unhurt, the woman and her husband moved to the front of the cabin, away from Fackrell—who was eventually persuaded by a passenger seated across the aisle to put down the razor.

The weapon was secured and later identified as a Facon wood-handled straight-edge razor.

Compelled by instances such as those transpired aboard JetBlue flight 871, the Air Marshal National Council—in the words of Labosco—is "calling on the president and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Mayorkas, to please stop this deployment of air marshals from the aircraft and reallocating them to the border.”

FMI: www.tsa.gov