Even With Tons of Money, ICE Finds Obstacles in Hiring 10,000 New Agents

The new recruitment page on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s website shows a drawing of a white-bearded Uncle Sam pointing to the viewer. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators,” the page reads. “We need YOU to get them out.” The pitch emphasizes that a college degree isn’t needed, and says recruits could be offered up to a $50,000 signing bonus and $60,000 in student loan repayment. The offers are part of a supercharged recruitment campaign that will take years to meet its goal. Republicans in Congress just allocated $30 billion to ICE to hire 10,000 new officers so it can ramp up deportations. But the Administration’s interest in boosting ICE’s headcount from 20,000 to 30,000 is bumping up against multiple challenges, including finding applicants who are both qualified and willing to live in parts of the country where ICE is intent on deploying more agents. “You’re talking three years before you see a significant increase of ICE agents on the street, which is the end of the administration,” predicts John Sandweg, who was the acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.  To spread the word, ICE is attending job fairs, college campuses and law enforcement recruiting events. Last week, Dean Cain, the 59-year-old actor who played Superman on TV in the 1990s, put his fame behind the recruitment effort, posting a video on X that he had signed up with ICE as an honorary officer. “I felt it was important to join with our first responders to help secure the safety of all Americans, not just talk about it. So I joined up.” ICE’s stepped-up recruitment effort comes as deportation and arrests are not keeping pace with the Administration’s goals of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day and deporting 1 million people in Trump’s first year in office. In the first week of its new recruitment campaign, the Department of Homeland Security said it received more than 80,000 applications. There are signs that most of those applicants were not what the agency was looking for. Within days, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that ICE was waiving its age limits for agents, accepting applicants as young as 18 and older than 40. Previously, people applying to ICE could not be younger than 21, and no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position. Trump’s top White House advisor on the border, Tom Homan, told reporters on Aug. 6 that ICE wasn’t having trouble recruiting, and he defended the decision to eliminate the age limits. “There are a lot of roles at ICE for people who are over 40,” Homan said. “Just because someone comes in and they’re 55—maybe they can’t carry a badge and a gun, they can certainly do administrative duty, they can do targeting on the intelligence team.” At the end of July, ICE sent an email to thousands of retired federal law enforcement agents under the subject line, “return to mission.” The email promised that retired federal officers could continue to receive their pension payments even as they started taking a new paycheck from ICE. “ICE is in vital need of reinforcement and your laterally applicable skillset will be pivotal in accomplishing our goals,” the email reads. “By returning to federal service with ICE, you are providing an honorable, indispensable service to our nation.” Sandweg says it’s a “pretty creative solution” to lure back retired law enforcement officers because they won’t need as much training on firearm use and other aspects of the job. But there aren’t enough retired agents to fill the thousands of positions they’re looking to fill, he says.  And for new hires, it takes time to train new deportation officers on how to properly carry a gun and conduct arrests. Such training for ICE agents takes place at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia. That’s created a bottleneck because there are only so many instructors and space to train new officers. “The administration wants boots on the ground as quickly as possible to ramp up arrests and ramp up deportations, but you can’t just bring them in off the street,” Sandweg says. “You’ve got to hire, background check, once they’re on board and cleared for a security clearance, you’ve got to get them down to FLETC.” To address the bottleneck, DHS is working to create smaller training centers in cities around the country, Secretary Noem said on Aug. 8 during a press conference in Lombard, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. “We may do a training right here closer to home so they aren’t away from their families for so long,” Noem told reporters. ICE’s aggressive recruitment efforts are already alarming sheriffs around the country who are concerned that the agency’s lucrative offers will peel away local officers already working on the street. But the agency’s recruiting challenge goes beyond training. Geography is also an obstacle. Under the Trump Administration, ICE aims to find and arrest more immigrants to deport in cities run by Democrats like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. It’s those same communities where it’s harder for ICE to poach law enforcement in the area because local police already pay better, says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. Moreover, many of ICE’s harsh actions in the past few months—showing up at court houses and workplaces to arrest people, often while masked—has further chipped away at the public perception of ICE nationally, but especially in those cities. “People do not just get attracted to jobs just for the money,” says Chishti. “There are other factors that come into play—location, people’s perception of the status of the job, people’s perception of how they are perceived in the job. All those are a bit of a problem for ICE today.”