ICE’s Hiring Surge Is Attracting A Bunch Of People Who Are Too Unfit (Or Too Criminal) To Work At ICE

from the not-sending-their-best dept

ICE can generate multiple horrible stories a day but it still can’t seem to find enough brown people to deport daily to satisfy White House advisor Stephen Miller’s demands for 3,000 arrests per day.

Trump and the GOP threw a lot of money at this problem with the Big Beautiful Bill. A lot of money: $75 billion over the next four years. Part of that goes to another metric ICE will apparently never meet: 10,000 new hires.

Not that ICE isn’t trying. It’s currently pissing off law enforcement agencies all over the country by throwing $50,000 signing bonuses at new recruits — something that has the potential to deprive local law enforcement of some of their current, um… talent. It has also lowered its standards and ripped the age limits off both ends of the scale, hoping to attract a blend of people who’ve already aged out of physical work and fresh faces their new bosses will likely assume don’t really want work.

Now that it’s been a few months since the hiring surge began, we’re finally seeing some results. And it’s possibly worse than you imagine. Here’s only the tip of the iceberg, as reported by Nick Miroff for The Atlantic:

President Donald Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia. It is the ICE personal-fitness test.

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.

“It’s pathetic,” one career ICE official told me, adding that before now, a typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous.

“Pathetic” is being kind. Everything about the hiring process has been eased and streamlined. The physical requirements have been lowered and still can’t be met. And those handling the recruits don’t know who’s capable of passing this entry requirement until they’re already on site because the application process allows potential hires to “self-certify” that they can, in fact, do a few push ups and sit ups.

Like nearly every other entity engaged in hiring, it also allows self-certification elsewhere. Applicants check a box and sign their names, swearing they don’t have a criminal record and can pass a drug test. Far too late, recruiters are realizing some of these applicants can’t do that either. And, again, they’re not finding this out until potential hires are already at the ICE academy and engaged in the training program.

That means unvetted applicants are getting access to ICE training materials and wandering through areas most members of the public would be barred from entering.

On top of that, the training itself continues to be compressed. What was once a four-month program has been cut to eight weeks. Since the time this article was published at the Atlantic, another two weeks have been shaved off the training period.

Not that shortening the time frame and lowering physical expectations seems to matter. Flooding the zone with recruits just means resources are being wasted.

Nearly half of new recruits who’ve arrived for training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center over the past three months were later sent home because they couldn’t pass the written exam, according to the data. 

But “sent home” isn’t entirely accurate. As both NBC News and the Atlantic report, people who fail to become ICE officers are often routed to other parts of the agency to handle administrative work. But they’re no better trained to do this work, which means the people who can are handling an influx of people who can’t, ensuring everything behind the scenes is going just as poorly as the more visible flame-outs in ICE’s version of basic training.

And, of course — this being a logistics-last administration — rushing a bunch of new people to ICE offices has created new problems that clearly no one considered, much less prepared for:

ICE does not have enough guns or vehicles for everyone, and the lack of experience among new hires with booking and processing procedures means they’re not especially helpful for administrative tasks. Other ICE field offices are short of parking spaces and bathroom capacity to accommodate a two- or threefold jump in staffing, a senior official told me. They’ve been told to divide up cubicles and look for additional space to lease.

Honestly, I’d expect nothing less than this sort of chaos from this administration. It moves like a wrecking ball covered in chainsaws, carving a wide swath of collateral damage en route to its target — a target that it very often seems to miss. It’s hard to imagine ICE being even worse than it already is, but given these early reports, the ICE we see now might be the best version of itself. And that might be one of the most depressing sentences I’ve ever written.

Filed Under: dhs, failure, ice, mass deportation, trump administration