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Thanksgiving travel week faces several possible obstacles
Just as there are good odds the turkey will taste dry, airports and highways are expected to be jam-packed during Thanksgiving week, a holiday period likely to end in another record day for air travel in the United States.
The people responsible for keeping security lines, boarding areas and jetliners moving – from the U.S. transportation secretary and airline chiefs on down the line – swear they’re prepared for the crowds.
But a strike by service workers in Charlotte Douglas International Airport threatens a hub in the Carolinas.
Airline passengers might get lucky like they did last year, when relatively few flights were canceled during the holiday week. A repeat will require the weather’s cooperation. And even if skies are blue, a shortage of air traffic controllers could create delays.
But another round of wintry weather could complicate travel leading up to Thanksgiving, according to forecasts across the U.S., while California and Washington state continue to recover from storm damage and power outages.
Auto club and insurance company AAA predicts that nearly 80 million Americans will venture at least 50 miles from home between Tuesday and next Monday. Most will travel by car.
Drivers should get a slight break on gas prices. The nationwide average price for gasoline was $3.06 a gallon on Sunday, down from $3.27 at this time last year.
The Transportation Security Administration expects to screen 18.3 million people at U.S. airports during the same seven-day stretch. That would be 6% more than during the corresponding days last year but fit a pattern set throughout 2024.
“This will be the busiest Thanksgiving ever in terms of air travel,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said. “Fortunately, our staffing is also at the highest levels that they have ever been. We are ready.”
Pekoske said TSA will have enough screeners to keep general security lines under 30 minutes and lines for people who pay extra for PreCheck under 10 minutes.
Service workers at Charlotte Douglas International Airport walked off the job to protest what they call unlivable wages.
Charlotte Douglas International Airport officials have said this holiday travel season is expected to be the busiest on record, with an estimated 1.02 million passengers departing the airport between last Thursday and the Monday after Thanksgiving.
And an ongoing shortage of air traffic controllers could cause flight delays.
Federal Aviation Administration Administrator Mike Whitaker said last week that he expects his agency to use special measures to deal with shortages at some facilities. In the past, that has included airports in New York City and Florida.
“If we are short on staff, we will slow traffic as needed to keep the system safe,” Whitaker said.
The FAA has long struggled with a shortage of controllers that airline officials expect will last for years, despite the agency’s lofty hiring goals.
Thanksgiving Day takes place late this year, with the fourth Thursday of November falling on Nov. 28. That shortens the traditional shopping season and changes the rhythm of holiday travel.
With more time before the holiday, people tend to spread out their outbound travel over more days, but everyone returns at the same time, said Andrew Watterson, the chief operating officer of Southwest Airlines.
“A late Thanksgiving leads to a big crush at the end – the Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday after Thanksgiving are usually very busy with Thanksgiving this late,” Watterson said.
Airlines did a relatively good job of handling holiday crowds last year, when the weather was mild in most of the country. Fewer than 400 U.S. flights were canceled during Thanksgiving week in 2023 – about one of every 450 flights. So far in 2024, airlines have canceled about 1.3% of all flights.
The rise of remote work also has caused the Thanksgiving travel period to expand, AAA spokesperson Aixa Diaz said.
“The pandemic changed everything,” she said. “What we have seen is that post-pandemic, people are leaving at certain times, perhaps even leaving the weekend before Thanksgiving, working remotely from their destination a couple of days, and then enjoying time with their loved ones.”
Nightmares of Thanksgivings past have further shaped holiday traffic jams. Motorists who learned to avoid traveling the day before and the Sunday after Thanksgiving have created new bottlenecks on other days, according to Diaz.
“Because we warned for so long (that) Wednesday and Sunday are the worst days to travel, people were like, ‘OK, I’m going to leave on Tuesday and come back on Monday to avoid the rush,'” she said. “So now those two days are congested, as well.”
Airport security officials are pleading with passengers to arrive early, not to put lithium-ion batteries in checked bags in case they overheat, and to keep guns out of carry-on bags. TSA has discovered more than 6,000 guns at checkpoints this year, and most of them were loaded.
Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas bring out many infrequent travelers, and they often have questions about what they can bring on planes.
TSA has a list on its website of items that are banned or restricted.
Drivers should know that Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons will be the worst times to travel by car, but it should be smooth sailing on freeways come Thanksgiving Day, according to transportation analytics company INRIX.
On the return home, the best travel times for motorists are before 1 p.m. on Sunday and before 8 a.m. or after 7 p.m. on Monday, the company said.
In metropolitan areas like Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and Washington, “traffic is expected to be more than double what it typically is on a normal day,” INRIX transportation analyst Bob Pishue said.
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Unlawful crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are on track to drop to a new low for the Biden administration in November, according to internal Customs and Border Protection figures obtained by CBS News.
U.S. Border Patrol is on pace to record fewer than 50,000 apprehensions of migrants crossing the southern border unlawfully this month. The agency has been averaging roughly 1,550 apprehensions between legal border entry points each day so far in November, according to the internal data.
While U.S. officials had been worried about a spike in migrant crossings after President-elect Donald Trump won the presidential election, due to his promises to seal the southern border, that has not materialized — at least not yet. In fact, illegal border crossings dropped slightly after Election Day.
If the trend holds, illegal border crossings in November will be below the 54,000 apprehensions logged by Border Patrol in September, the current Biden-era low. The last time illegal border crossings were lower was in the summer of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sharply reduced migration.
Spikes in migrants journeying to the U.S. border have bedeviled Republican and Democratic presidents alike. But migrant apprehensions soared to record highs under Mr. Biden, peaking at 250,000 in December. The Trump-era monthly high was 133,000 in May 2019.
The current four-year-low in illegal immigration reflects a broader decrease that began earlier this year and that has been mainly attributed to efforts by the Mexican government to stop migrants from reaching American soil and asylum restrictions enacted by President Biden in June.
That stringent asylum policy has dramatically cut the number of migrants released into the U.S. and allowed to apply for legal protection, government statistics show.
Trump has vowed to enact even stricter measures, promising to oversee the largest deportation operation in American history and dismantle Biden administration programs that allow certain migrants to enter the country legally. Under one of those policies, the U.S. is currently processing about 40,000 migrants each month at official border crossings after they secure appointments through a smartphone app.
The “ultimate irony”
Trump made the situation at the border under Mr. Biden central to his campaign, and his hardline immigration proposals resonated with many voters. Mass deportation, for example, continues to enjoy support from a majority of Americans, CBS News polling shows. But Trump could very well inherit a border that is relatively quiet.
“It is an ultimate irony, and it is going to put Trump in a position of declaring victory,” said Doris Meissner, who led the now-defunct Immigration Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration and currently serves as a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.
The lull at the border, should it persist, could allow the incoming Trump administration to focus limited immigration enforcement resources in the interior of the country, to carry out the president-elect’s mass deportation plan, which faces formidable logistical hurdles.
With roughly 6,000 law enforcement officers and 41,000 detention beds, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation branch currently lacks the manpower and resources to arrest, detain and deport the millions of unauthorized immigrants Trump and his allies have promised to expel from the country.
Trump’s top advisers have floated proposals to tap into the Department of Defense’s vast resources, including by using military planes for deportations and tasking National Guard soldiers with carrying out immigration arrests. But the feasibility — and legality — of those plans remain open questions.
Meissner said the relatively calm at the southern border could allow Trump’s administration to redirect Border Patrol resources towards interior immigration enforcement. But she warned that the lull in illegal border crossings could be disrupted if Mexican enforcement eases or if programs that discourage migrants from crossing the border illegally by offering them a legal path to enter the U.S. are terminated.
“There is a formula right now that even though it’s fragile, is working,” Meissner said. “The Trump administration is very disruptor oriented, and it could actually find itself having more of a problem than is now the case at the border.”
Unlike scores of people who scrambled for the blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy to lose weight in recent years, Danielle Griffin had no trouble getting them.
The 38-year-old information technology worker from New Mexico had a prescription. Her pharmacy had the drugs in stock. And her health insurance covered all but $25 to $50 of the monthly cost.
For Griffin, the hardest part of using the new drugs wasn’t access. It was finding out that the much-hyped medications didn’t really work for her.
“I have been on Wegovy for a year and a half and have only lost 13 pounds,” said Griffin, who watches her diet, drinks plenty of water and exercises regularly. “I’ve done everything right with no success. It’s discouraging.”
In clinical trials, most participants taking Wegovy or Mounjaro to treat obesity lost an average of 15% to 22% of their body weight — up to 50 pounds or more in many cases. But roughly 10% to 15% of patients in those trials were “nonresponders” who lost less than 5% of their body weight.
Now that millions of people have used the drugs, several obesity experts told The Associated Press that perhaps 20% of patients — as many as 1 in 5 — may not respond well to the medications. It’s a little-known consequence of the obesity drug boom, according to doctors who caution eager patients not to expect one-size-fits-all results.
“It’s all about explaining that different people have different responses,” said Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity expert at Massachusetts General Hospital
The drugs are known as GLP-1 receptor agonists because they mimic a hormone in the body known as glucagon-like peptide 1. Genetics, hormones and variability in how the brain regulates energy can all influence weight — and a person’s response to the drugs, Stanford said. Medical conditions such as sleep apnea can prevent weight loss, as can certain common medications, such as antidepressants, steroids and contraceptives.
“This is a disease that stems from the brain,” said Stanford. “The dysfunction may not be the same” from patient to patient.
Despite such cautions, patients are often upset when they start getting the weekly injections but the numbers on the scale barely budge.
“It can be devastating,” said Dr. Katherine Saunders, an obesity expert at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-founder of the obesity treatment company FlyteHealth. “With such high expectations, there’s so much room for disappointment.”
That was the case for Griffin, who has battled obesity since childhood and hoped to shed 70 pounds using Wegovy. The drug helped reduce her appetite and lowered her risk of diabetes, but she saw little change in weight.
“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” she said. “You want it to work like it does for everybody else.”
The medications are typically prescribed along with eating behavior and lifestyle changes.
It’s usually clear within weeks whether someone will respond to the drugs, said Dr. Jody Dushay, an endocrine specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Weight loss typically begins right away and continues as the dosage increases.
For some patients, that just doesn’t happen. For others, side effects such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea force them to halt the medications, Dushay said. In such situations, patients who were counting on the new drugs to pare pounds may think they’re out of options.
“I tell them: It’s not game over,” Dushay said.
Trying a different version of the new class of drugs may help. Griffin, who didn’t respond well to Wegovy, has started using Zepbound, which targets an additional hormone pathway in the body. After three months of using the drug, she has lost 7 pounds.
“I’m hoping it’s slow and steady,” she said.
Other people respond well to older drugs, the experts said. Changing diet, exercise, sleep and stress habits can also have profound effects. Figuring out what works typically requires a doctor trained to treat obesity, Saunders noted.
“Obesity is such a complex disease that really needs to be treated very comprehensively,” she said. “If what we’re prescribing doesn’t work, we always have a backup plan.”