ICE’s Hiring Surge Is Already a Disaster

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ICE, turbocharged by $75 billion in new dollars, is in a huge rush to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 new deportation officers.

ICE’s early hiring events this summer and fall were spectacles — and the online social media marketing drive has been extensive (and hugely racist), touting the $50,000 recruiting bonus for new deportation officers. ICE suddenly had so much money, it was spending nearly $3 million to buy a fleet of souped-up pickup trucks and SUVs in order to use them for photo ops — and decorate them all in an all-new “ICE color scheme” that happens to almost exactly match the livery of Donald Trump’s personal jet. (I’m sure that’s a total coincidence.) For a moment, it was even offering officers cash bonuses for deporting people.

The Department of Homeland Security posted nakedly Christian white nationalist imagery, videos and memes more in line with an invading army than a civilian law enforcement agency — including a hearty endorsement of one of the most widely recognized images of white settler “Manifest Destiny” of all time and slogans that, for all intents and purposes, come from Neo-Nazis.

In those halcyon early days, ICE kept bragging about its huge numbers of applications — more than 50,000 individuals, many of whom applied for multiple positions, such that ICE was inundated with 175,000 total applications. The hiring rush as so overwhelmed ICE and DHS that the department has reassigned teams from FEMA to help out on the HR staffing.

But it turns out, if you’re hiring for a pariah agency using nakedly fascist and racist messaging and recruiting for a job where you get to be jeered by your neighbors and are so hated that you literally refuse to show your face, and trying to attract people who will get excited to cos-play as a Navy SEAL in full tactical gear to dress up like you’re taking Fallujah while facing down people in inflatable frog costumes and wrestling to the ground hard-working roofers in the Home Depot parking lot, America’s best, brightest, and most fit don’t apply.

Early in the summer, I wrote about the experience and history of the hiring surge post-9/11 by Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol. I actually spent five years covering the wave of crime and corruption that overwhelmed CBP afterward — a tidal wave so huge that from 2005 to 2012, there were a total of 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents — meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years — and that even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, that pace of arrest had only slowed to one CBP agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. 

As I wrote in early July, “What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.”

Now we’re getting the first reports from the front lines of ICE’s recruiting and hiring drive — and it’s going precisely as poorly as predicted. As CNN quoted an administration official last week, “It’s a shit show.”

Five quick data points:

• Training standards cut? Check! ICE, proving that it’s building a MAGA cult of personality as much as hiring for a law enforcement agency, has cut its previous five-month training academy to just 47 days, a period chosen, according to what three officials told The Atlantic, “because Trump is the 47th president.” ICE is no longer interviewing candidates before hiring them (what could go wrong with hiring officers you’ve never seen in person?) and swearing them in virtually, promising that it’ll catch up on their background checks later, CNN reported last week.
  

• Poor vetting and hiring standards cut? Check! Just as CBP and the Border Patrol did in the 2000s, DHS is now racing new hires into the academy before it’s even completed their background checks and vetting. “ICE officials only later discovered that some of the recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve,” sources told NBC News last week. “Staff members at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong-arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found as recently as this month that some recruits going through the six-week training course hadn’t submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said.” So far more than 200 recruits have been dismissed while in training. ICE even, apparently, made a job offer to a DEA informant, according to CNN.
  

• Poor vetting and hiring choices, Part II? Check! It turns out that a third of the new recruits who have been hired and are reporting to the academy are so out-of-shape that they’re washing out of the physical fitness test. As The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff, who is doing some of the best current reporting on this unfolding debacle, reported, “More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.”

• Lowering Hiring Requirements Going Poorly? Check! For those who DO pass the physical fitness training, it’s ALSO not going well. As NBC reports, “Nearly half of new recruits who’ve arrived … over the past three months were later sent home because they couldn’t pass the written exam, according to the data. The academic requirement includes an exam in which officers are allowed to consult their textbooks and notes at the end of a legal course on the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Fourth Amendment, which outlines when officers can and can’t conduct searches and seizures.” E.G., they’re not able to pass the basic exams, which includes, as MSNBC notes, a literal open-book exam on the most basic responsibilities of their new job.
  

• Inexperienced officers in the field? Check! How ICE is trained even when they’re deployed is its own scandal: An ICE officer managed to shoot a US marshal last week when the ICE officer accidentally fired his service weapon, perhaps while using it to break a car window (not exactly standard safe procedure!) or while trying to grab a suspect.  

But there are other problems here too. What’s even more worrisome is that other federal law enforcement agencies are now cutting their hiring standards too. In the spirit of what I’ve been calling “Everything is ICE,” how the rest of federal law enforcement is becoming more like ICE than vice versa, other agencies like the FBI are actually lowering their long-standing higher hiring and training standards to more closely match ICE. For the first time, FBI Director Kash Patel wants to drop the college degree-requirement and turn its traditionally highly educated, older agent workforce into something more like ICE’s high-school educated street cops; the training they get will drop from 18 weeks to just eight, a stunning cut.

As I’ve written before, ICE’s “Enforcement and Removal Operations” (ERO) deportation officers have long been seen by their peers as the bottom of the federal law enforcement hierarchy — other agencies quip that ICE officers are hired “by the pound, from the pound.” Now the rest of federal law enforcement wants to race ICE to the bottom qualifications-wise.

Moreover, there’s not a lot of confidence in the background checks and vetting that ICE is doing right now. As one current DHS official told NBC News, “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks.’ … The official said many of the issues that have been flagged during training surface only because the recruits admitted they didn’t submit to fingerprinting or drug testing before they arrived. ‘What about the ones who don’t admit it?’ the official said.”

The downstream consequences for law enforcement, the communities, and the country of these disastrous and misdirected hiring surges are huge — and long-lasting. It’s 2025, almost twenty years after the Border Patrol hiring surge started, and the agency is still trying to claw back to a baseline of misconduct, corruption, and criminality. This summer, a Border Patrol agent in the Tucson Sector was arrested and charged with 24 felony criminal counts, including 10 counts of child sex trafficking — the fourth CBP agent or officer this year to be arrested or sentenced for sex crimes in Arizona alone.

CBP can’t say it wasn’t warned: That same agent was suspected a decade ago of a rape in Tucson — just three years after he was hired in 2011 at the peak of the agency’s surge breakdown — but CBP never investigated the allegations. The investigation found the agent solicited sex while on duty and even got the government to reimburse him for hotels he was using for sex.

Now, with CBP’s experience so stark and clear, just think how long we’re going to be living as a country with the damage being done by ICE right now.

Thanks for reading — if you have any of your own thoughts or angles of this story or tales of woe of ICE recruiting, and/or want to add me to your own group chats, I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal. That’s my normal username, everywhere, with an extra Vermont: the 14th state.

GMG

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