Former Department of Homeland Security officials and employees are raising the alarm that the Trump administration’s plan to hire 10,000 more immigration enforcement officers could result in lower hiring standards, as expansions have in the past, and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers’ current behavior could attract prospective agents for the wrong reasons.
As part of its campaign to hire new ICE personnel, the Trump administration has presented a smattering of offers, including a $10,000 yearly bonus for agents over the next four years, a $50,000 signing bonus to former ICE agents who decide to return to the agency and a starting salary of up to $89,528 for new officers.
Combined with the fact that ICE agents are not required to take any pre-employment exams, have no educational requirements and are only required to pass a background check and a physical exam (which includes a “kneel/stand test,” five minutes of cardio and performing 15 pushups in two minutes), the job offers a better salary and benefits than many, especially considering it doesn’t even require a high school education.
John Sandweg, who served as the acting director of ICE from 2013 to 2014, told Salon that he’s concerned that the current conduct of the agency under Trump could also attract candidates for the “wrong reasons.”
ICE, as part of Trump’s mass deportation scheme, has been accused of using racial profiling and targeting even Puerto Ricans and Native Americans, who are U.S. citizens. Some raids have also been criticized as intimidation tactics and some have also become violent, like in California earlier this month when masked federal agents — brandishing firearms and deploying chemical irritants and flash bang grenades — clashed with protesters.
“I do worry that in this kind of supercharged environment we’re in, there are going to be some people who want to get into this for the wrong reasons, and that’s not because they’re trying to make the country safer, but maybe some bias and hatred towards immigrants generally,” Sandweg said. “That’s the concern, that and lowering the bar in terms of picking people who would otherwise normally be disqualified and bringing them on board.”
Sandweg said that, in his experience at the agency, ICE agents are, “by and large, a very high-quality group” and that most of the people “signed up to make the country safer.”
Sandweg said that the only real historical analog for the Department of Homeland Security is towards the end of the Bush administration, when an influx of funding for the Border Patrol resulted in a rush to spend the money.
“That’s a really good parallel,” Sandweg said.“The Trump administration now has funding to double the size of ICE, and unquestionably, they’re going to want to deploy those assets as quickly as humanly possible. I would expect them to put ICE under tremendous pressure to deploy these agents and officers quickly.”
Sandweg estimated that, under normal circumstances, it would take the agency around three-and-a-half years to train and deploy this many agents. This would include finding applicants and putting them through a basic 13-week training course in the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, as well as field training. The expansion would also require capital investments in field offices, increasing their size and expanding support staff in departments like human resources.
ICE could speed this process up, according to Sandweg, through the use of private contractors in some of the hiring process, which has already been commonplace in processes like background checks for decades, and by lowering the standards for new agents. ICE hasn’t yet said it will lower standards, though it has happened at other agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, like when Customs and Border Protection eliminated the 100-flight-hour requirement for pilots in 2018 and one of their physical fitness tests the same year.
Jason Houser, who served as the chief of staff of ICE under former President Barack Obama, said that he shared many of Sandweg’s concerns in terms of the practical hurdles and the potential for lower standards, whether it be in recruitment or training, for new ICE agents.
Houser also raised a different issue facing the administration, which is that there’s no way ICE could expand its workforce to achieve the millions of deportations that Trump is promising in the next three-and-a-half years, at least through conventional hiring. Typically, ICE can train between 800 and 1,000 officers a year, according to Houser.
Normally, Houser explained, the bigger problem for recruitment is not in finding candidates interested in the job but in actually getting a candidate through a background check and training, or what he called “securing” a candidate.
“With any job in federal law enforcement, 10 to 15 to 20% of candidates they’re ill-equipped for the job. They have a violent past, a domestic assault charge, you know, convictions. They have extremist views, left or right, that they’ve exposed online. You know, these are the candidates that need to be whittled out,” Houser said.
Houser told Salon, however, that he expects the Trump administration might lean on private contractors for more than just recruitment.
“What I believe they’re going to do is in the near term, I think they’re going to look to Blackwater-type companies, contract firms, to bring on staff that have law enforcement ‘credentials’ to augment deportation officers,” Houser said.
Houser went on to explain that there are a few different permutations of deputization the administration could pursue, including deputizing National Guard troops or local law enforcement before they start using private contractors.
Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent and activist, told Salon that as a senior patrol agent and a critic of the agency, she’s observed a connection between low hiring standards and criminality and abuse among officers.
A 2019 report corroborated this observation through a review of internal agency documents, which found that Border Patrol agents were about five times as likely to be arrested as state and local law enforcement. The same year, ProPublica uncovered a Facebook group where thousands of then-current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the death of immigrants and other abuses. In terms of trends, CBP data reported by Quartz shows that criminal arrests among CBP officers and Border Patrol reached a five-year high in 2018.
Budd said that the hiring spree, combined with the current behavior of immigration officers across the Department of Homeland Security, stands to attract candidates simply looking to have power over others.
Budd also pointed to individuals like Dana Thornhill, a former Border Patrol agent who was convicted of sexually abusing minors, as the sort of person that stringent hiring standards and oversight would theoretically keep out.
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Mario Russell, executive director at the Center for Migration Studies of New York, situated the current expansion of ICE as part of a decades-long ballooning of the detention and deportation apparatus in the United States. All of the growth coming, as Russell notes, detention and deportation being shown to be ineffective at the administration’s ostensible goal of reducing crime.
“Fewer than 5,000 people were held in the immigration detention system in the 1980s per day, but now, 56,494 people are being detained by ICE nationally, as of the latest data from June 10,” Russell said, identifying the post-9/11 creation of DHS and ICE as a key moment in this process.
“None of these expansion initiatives have proven effective in the long run or useful in the short run —apart from separating families and causing significant individual suffering,” Russell argued, citing academic research showing immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than American citizens. “And recent demographic research has found that crime rates drop when immigration increases — the share of immigrants in the country’s population doubled between 1980 and 2022, and in that same time period, the national crime rate dropped by 60.4 percent.”
In Houser’s assessment, the current goal of the administration is not to determine whether an individual is a public safety risk and remove them, but to sweep up as many immigrants as possible.
“In the immigration system, from someone leaving their home in Venezuela and coming to this country seeking a pathway, ICE’s job, on the deportation and ERO side, is to determine public safety, national security risks and if someone has a final order of removal and can be humanely removed, to humanely remove them. That’s what we hope they do,” Houser said. “People that don’t have that training, that don’t have the respect for law enforcement, that have never carried a weapon for this country — like Stephen Miller — are putting quotas, arrest quotas, on ICE officers.”
The long and short of it, according to Houser, is that ICE won’t be able to meet the detention and deportation goals of the current administration without serious changes to the way ICE officers are recruited and how the agency is staffed.
“Wearing a badge comes with a great deal of trust and, you know, responsibility, and some people aren’t equipped to have that, and that’s what those screening processes are [for],” Houser said. “Doing away with that, you’re going to have an influx of bad actors.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment from Salon.
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