Judge: TSA ‘plainly’ violated court order with renewed union busting push

This story has been updated at 6:30 p.m. ET.

A federal judge in Seattle on Thursday put a halt to the Trump administration’s renewed effort to strip Transportation Security Administration workers of their collective bargaining rights, finding that a gambit to replace a policy document undergirding the initiative with a more detailed one “plainly” violated a 2025 court order.

When TSA was established following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the agency was granted broad discretion to administer its personnel system. But following years of poor morale and high attrition rates, the agency granted the workforce abridged collective bargaining rights in 2011 and expanded those rights in 2022 and issued a new pay scale akin to the federal government’s General Schedule.

Last March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a determination seeking to unwind TSA workers’ collective bargaining rights, but U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman found that decision to be retaliatory against the American Federation of Government Employees, particularly due to the “threadbare justification” in Noem’s memo, and issued a preliminary injunction blocking its implementation.

But last month, TSA unveiled that Noem had issued a new determination last September that included new details in its justification for excising unions at the agency, particularly the purported costs of collective bargaining, though those costs amounted to a sliver of the agency’s budget.

In an order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead, a Biden appointee who took over the case last October, scolded the administration for its attempted end-run around the original injunction.

“The question before the court is straightforward: does defendants’ planned implementation of the September Noem determination violate the existing preliminary injunction?” Whitehead wrote. “The answer is plainly yes. Among other things, the September determination ‘terminates’ the 2024 CBA, ‘cancels all grievances and arbitration,’ and strips TSOs of their ‘right to elect an exclusive representative for the purposes of collective bargaining.’ There can be no doubt that these actions directly ‘deny plaintiffs, their members, and all bargaining unit TSOs any and all rights and/or working conditions guaranteed in the 2024 CBA,’ and thus defy the constraints imposed by Prong 2 of the preliminary injunction.”

Indeed, in emergency proceedings and legal briefs filed in the wake of last month’s announcement that AFGE would be removed from TSA, defendants made “no argument to the contrary,” instead arguing against the original preliminary injunction.

“Rather than engage with the injunction’s plain language, defendants launch collateral attacks against the jurisdictional, legal and factual bases for the injunction,” Whitehead wrote. “But a party subject to an injunction who believes compliance is no longer required must move to modify or dissolve the injunction—and that motion must be granted before the party may cease compliance.”

Whitehead granted AFGE’s motion to enforce the original preliminary injunction against TSA, and clarified that TSA may not implement the September Noem declaration as originally scheduled Sunday.

“The preliminary injunction will remain in effect unless and until it is modified, dissolved or stayed by a court of law,” he wrote.

In a statement, AFGE National President Everett Kelley applauded the ruling and condemned the Trump administration's persistence in attacking airport screeners' collective bargaining rights.

"On behalf of the 47,000 TSA officers our union represents, I thank the court for stepping in to prevent the administration from ripping up their union contract again,” Kelley said. “TSA officers—many of whom are veterans—are patriotic public servants who swore an oath to protect the safety of the traveling public and to ensure that another horrific attack like September 11 never happens again. The administration’s repeated efforts to strip these workers of a voice in their working conditions should concern every person who steps foot in an airport.”