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(NEW YORK) — The ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown is taking its toll on the thousands of Transportation Security Administration employees at airports who have been working without pay.

Approximately 60,000 TSA officers who have gone over a month with partial pay began receiving their first $0 paychecks last week.

Many say they are living in fear, with some taking on extra jobs or even leaving the agency altogether to make ends meet.

And if there is no relief soon, veteran TSA leaders fear that the stress and uncertainty could impact operations for years

“Who wants to go work in public service in the public sector when you’re treated like a yo-yo?” a TSA worker who asked to remain anonymous told ABC News.

The current partial shutdown, now in its second month, comes close to last fall’s 43-day federal government shutdown, which paused payments to thousands of TSA workers, who were still required to work their shift.

Angela Grana, a TSA officer at Durango-La Plata County Airport in Colorado, told ABC News Live on Monday, the first day that TSA workers missed their checks, that the entire situation has been humiliating for her co-workers.

“The stories I get are very demoralizing,” Grana, who serves as the state’s regional vice president for AFGE TSA Local 1127, said. “To go ahead and do the Uber Eats or any other kind of side job, we have to have extra permission. For now, we can’t just do it.”
Senate Democrats have vowed to block funding for DHS until reforms are made to Immigration and Customs Enforcement following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal law enforcement.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called on Democrats Monday to join a discharge petition that would fund all DHS agencies except for ICE.

A vote on similar legislation failed earlier in the Senate. Jeffries would need at least four Republicans to sign on with all Democrats for the discharge petition to move forward.

Grana said the stress of making ends meet and keeping the airports safe is getting to a lot of TSA officers. Several airports across the country have begun food pantries for their employees affected by the partial shutdown.

“Let me tell you, for us to be concentrating on our jobs without the hunger pains in our stomachs. It’s really difficult to do. We can’t get it wrong,” Grana said.  “We have to get it right every time. We cannot miss a bag, we cannot miss a threat.”

Jill DeJanovich, a TSA officer at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas and single mom of four, was one of the nearly 2,700 TSA workers who called out sick this week, because of the demands put on her.

DeJanovich, who is the a AFGE Local 1260 Chief Administrative Point of contact in Nevada, said she is frustrated with Congress for not moving forward and ending the quagmire over funding.

“Someone needs to cross the line before Congress goes on break for Easter recess,” she said.

While some TSA officers said they had to power on through, for others, like Robert Echeverria, the strain of a second DHS shutdown in five months proved to be too much.

After nine years working at Salt Lake City International Airport a lead TSA officer, Echeverria told ABC News that he left his job after the current shutdown. Echeverria said his family’s life savings were depleted after the last shutdown.

“Emotionally, we couldn’t go through that strain anymore,” he told ABC News.

“It was just really hard for my wife and emotionally to see my kids going through a hard time asking for things, and we wouldn’t be able to actually help them out,” he added.

A TSA worker who asked not to be named warned that the loss of employees can’t easily be fixed.

“Losing seasoned employees is very difficult to replace,” the TSA worker said. “New hires take two years to get off probation.”

The worker added that the accumulating debt borne by government employees will also affect staffing.

“One of the requirements is that you have a great credit rating. A lot of our officers are not going to have that now,” they said.

Joseph Cerletti, a TSA officer at Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, told ABC News that he struggles to explain to his kids about their financial issues now that his family has to depend solely on his wife’s income.

Cerletti relented that he and his coworkers “don’t have the upper ground here” when it comes to fighting for their rights.

“It’s very hard to find words in the English language to describe how I feel about it, other than speechless,” he said. “This is just what I’ve been describing lately as figuratively an uphill gunfight.”

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(NEW YORK) — Dolores Huerta, the iconic civil rights leader and co-founder of the United Farm Workers, said she decided to speak out to support other women who have come forward after a New York Times report revealed accusations of sexual assault against the late labor leader Cesar Chávez.

“And to think that somebody that we looked at as our hero and our leader — you know, it’s pretty horrible,” Huerta said in a network exclusive with John Quiñones.

According to the Times, the late farmworker organizer, who became a national civil rights icon, used his position of power to exploit some of the women and minors who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification.

Chavez died in 1993 at age 66.

On Wednesday, Huerta said in a statement that she was “manipulated and pressured into having sex” with Chávez. Huerta, 95, stated she had two separate sexual encounters with Chávez in the 1960s — one in which she said she was pressured to have sex with him and the other in which she said she was forced against her will.

“Your first name, Dolores, in English translates into pain or aching. Have you been suffering in silence, holding these secrets all these decades?” asked Quiñones.

“It was very hard, it was very hard to keep this. But, you know, I think I am building on the courage of these young women — that they had the courage to come out and say what happened to them. And God knows what they’ve suffered,” Huerta said. “It was time.”

According to the Times, one of the women who spoke out alleged she was 12 years old when Chávez first touched her inappropriately and 15 when he raped her in California. Another woman alleged she was summoned for sexual encounters with Chávez dozens of times over a four-year period, starting when she was 13 and he was 45.

Huerta said Chávez “had an evil side to him.”

“Cesar spoke about and practiced the nonviolent movement,” Huerta said. “Well, what could be more violent than that?”

Huerta says both encounters she had with Chávez led to pregnancies that she kept secret, later arranging for the children to be raised by other families.

“I thought that abortion was a sin,” Huerta told Quiñones. “I have since changed my mind on those issues because I now realize that women have to have a right to abortion. And by the way, abortion was also illegal at that time.”

She told ABC News one of the children was raised by her brother and the other was raised by a family friend.
When asked about Chavez’s legacy amid the allegations, Huerta said she hopes that “his legacy would live on in the things that were accomplished.”

Huerta’s career as an activist began in 1955 when she joined the Community Service Organization, where she met Chavez. Together, they founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, which later became the UFW.

Huerta played a pivotal role in the Delano grape strike of 1965 and led the subsequent national boycott of table grapes, which successfully pressured growers to improve wages and working conditions.

In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Huerta the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Huerta said she remains committed to her work, focusing on current threats to labor rights and the treatment of immigrants in detention centers.

“My intention is just to do the work, make lives better for women, make lives better for working people,” Huerta said. “We know that the job isn’t finished yet.”

“At my age, 96, as long as God gives me strength and the little energy that I have left, I want to just continue doing the work to make life better for women, for children, and of course, for farmworkers and workers in general,” she added.

“I know we have a long fight ahead of us, even in our country right now, because so many of the gains that have been won over the years are being taken away from us.”

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