LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Robert Echeverria is one of the more than 500 TSA officers who quit during the partial government shutdown. Echeverria worked for the agency for nearly a decade, based at the Salt Lake City International Airport, and he joins me now. Good morning.
ROBERT ECHEVERRIA: Good morning. How are you, Leila?
FADEL: I'm doing well. Thank you for joining us. I want to first ask what the last few weeks on the job were like for you before you made the decision to quit.
ECHEVERRIA: I knew it was coming. I knew the shutdown was coming. So it was just kind of just one of those gut-wrenching feelings that, like, hey, I can't do this anymore, I can't. I can't spend nights without sleeping, trying to figure out whether we're going to go into a shutdown or not.
FADEL: You said I can't do this anymore because you've been through other government shutdowns, right? But this time you made this decision to walk away from a job you'd done for nearly a decade. What was it that drove that decision?
ECHEVERRIA: This was actually my fifth shutdown in the last nine years.
FADEL: Wow.
ECHEVERRIA: And so the biggest difference is we weren't even actually fully recovered from the last shutdown and the next one hit. And so that was actually just kind of one of those things that my - I just didn't want my family to go through it anymore. And so we actually didn't even have a Christmas because, I mean, it's just it was either Christmas gift or paying bills.
FADEL: Are you working now?
ECHEVERRIA: So currently, I work for the city, and which is great. I love every single moment of it. And I work for the airport division, which I still get to see all of my colleagues. And I actually see it with different eyes now. And it actually breaks my heart, seeing them day in and day out and the struggle that they go through, and seeing that in their eyes and how much they are really hurting. It breaks my heart seeing them each and every day.
FADEL: Now that President Trump has ordered back pay and some agents have actually gotten the back pay, do you have any regrets about leaving?
ECHEVERRIA: No. No, because I actually - in reality, I actually left in the middle of - right in the beginning of the actual shutdown. And so that's just - to me, that's actually just a little Band-Aid. And to me, it doesn't solve anything because I still haven't gotten back paid for it. And I don't know when I'm actually going to get back paid for it.
And then the officers that actually did stay on, I'm still in connect with a lot of them. Their paychecks are half of what they thought they were going to get. A lot of them did not get paid all of their differential, their overtime. And so, still, there's a lot of uncertainty out there when it comes down to pay. And still a lot of officers still haven't even gotten paid yet.
FADEL: What do you want travelers to know about the work that TSA officers do?
ECHEVERRIA: I think we're very underrated. And a lot of people don't think that our job actually means something. But they actually don't really see the outcome of what we do day in and day out. I worked in Salt Lake City Airport, and we pretty much average a gun a day, for so many years, that people actually either forgot or something. And so, and also about 900 pounds of prohibited items a month.
FADEL: Wow.
ECHEVERRIA: And we had to catch those things.
FADEL: That's now former TSA officer Robert Echeverria. Thank you so much for your time.
ECHEVERRIA: No, I appreciate you having me, and thank you.
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