{"id":129900,"date":"2025-07-18T03:54:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T03:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/129900\/"},"modified":"2025-07-18T03:54:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T03:54:10","slug":"a-former-ice-official-is-worried-that-the-agency-is-about-to-go-on-a-hiring-spree-of-proud-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/129900\/","title":{"rendered":"A Former ICE Official Is Worried That the Agency Is About to Go on a Hiring Spree of Proud Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

In the 22 years since Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created to identify and eliminate border security threats, Congress has again and again failed to reform the badly broken immigration system that ICE polices. That failure has fostered a culture of grievance at ICE and its sister agencies, and Donald Trump\u2019s hard-line immigration position has only indulged that siege mentality. Now, in an effort to push agents to achieve his mass deportation agenda, Trump has granted the agency a massive, record-breaking cash infusion, while in the same stroke, he eliminated the oversight bodies that are supposed to regulate ICE\u2019s actions. One former top ICE official says that there\u2019s a worryingly real possibility that the incoming agents will be seeded from \u201cProud Boys and other insurrectionists.\u201d Whether or not that nightmare scenario is realized, the results of Trump\u2019s agent expansion and oversight contraction will likely spell disaster for civil liberties across the country.<\/p>\n

Since its inception in 2002, ICE has become the second-largest investigative agency in the federal government, and today it has about 21,000 employees and an annual budget of $8 billion. For years, ICE has been accused of using problematic tactics<\/a> when enforcing immigration law, a trend that has skyrocketed since Trump took office<\/a> again this year. By March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had announced that the three oversight divisions within DHS were effectively shutting down: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. These were established by Congress as a way to implement oversight of DHS and focused on\u00a0protecting detainees\u2019 civil rights and ensuring they were receiving immigration-related benefits. Noem fired a majority of their staff by claiming their work was creating \u201croadblocks\u201d to immigration enforcement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group sued<\/a>, forcing the oversight bodies to remain open, though key positions are either empty or being held by Trump-aligned figures\u2014Troup Hemenway, a former leader on Project 2025<\/a>, was appointed acting officer for the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.<\/a><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill awarded ICE $29.9 billion<\/a> for enforcement and deportation operations\u2014a threefold increase of their current annual budget. Even more funding will be provided to hire 10,000 new immigration enforcement agents, intended to push \u201cthe rate of deportations to reach as high as 1 million per year,\u201d Noem announced<\/a>. All in all, DHS, which oversees ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Customs and Border Protection, secured $165 billion in the new legislation.<\/p>\n

Scott Shuchart, former assistant director of ICE under the Biden administration, does not believe the agency is capable of spending this money responsibly. \u201cThis administration is led by criminals, and they\u2019re going to keep doing unlawful and terrible things,\u201d he told me. It\u2019s hard to keep track of just how unprecedented, expansive, and legally questionable the Trump administration\u2019s push on immigration enforcement has been, from arresting immigrants at courthouses and revoking legal status from hundreds of thousands of people to targeting birthright citizenship. It\u2019s led to a massive wave of lawsuits, which the federal government is mostly losing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ICE is largely the face of these actions, with about 9,000 people working under Enforcement and Removal Operations, which are the officers tasked with enforcing civil interior immigration law. They go into local communities, identify immigrants being targeted by the administration, and then go on to arrest and detain them. Since Trump took office, these officers have been wearing masks to obscure their identities as they arrest people, inciting widespread fear and confusion across American communities. Some states have pushed back by introducing legislation<\/a> that would ban law enforcement from wearing masks or a personal disguise while performing their duties. A group of detainees also filed a lawsuit <\/a>against the Trump administration arguing that masks enable ICE to flout the Constitution and federal law.<\/p>\n

The OBBB has appropriated funding to double this department to 20,000, which Shuchart is certain will drastically change the agency\u2019s culture. \u201cI\u2019m very worried that they are going to be Proud Boys and other insurrectionists and hoodlums,\u201d Shuchart said. \u201cWhat self-respecting person who wants a meaningful career in law enforcement would go to work at the ERO right now, knowing the way ERO comports itself?\u201d Hiring ERO officers typically takes months, as applicants must go through a security clearance process and then spend time at a training academy. Shuchart explained that Border Patrol officers traditionally make up a large share of ERO officers, since that unit is considered an entry path into federal law enforcement and hires younger applicants with less experience.<\/p>\n

From his time at ICE, Shuchart said ERO\u2019s culture was already one of grievance and self-pity. The job was considered difficult; they canvass the entire country for immigrants who are here without legal status, and do so with too few resources. They resent sanctuary cities, which are local jurisdictions that don\u2019t work with federal immigration efforts, feeling that they put ICE in danger and made their job harder. And if there was a death of a migrant in a detention center, it was \u201crarely anyone\u2019s fault,\u201d said Shuchart, with officers blaming the detention center\u2019s conditions on inadequate funding.<\/p>\n

During Trump\u2019s first term, ProPublica discovered a Facebook group<\/a> made up of employees of CBP in which participants, including a CBP supervisor, made sexualized posts about members of Congress and used degrading language to describe migrants. Since Trump took office, the culture has further shifted, with officers working around the clock under pressure to meet impossibly high arrest quotas<\/a>. One career ICE official told the Atlantic<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s miserable.\u201d<\/p>\n

The toxicity is spreading to local law enforcement, as federal agents raid their communities completely masked and unidentifiable, which ends up eroding residents\u2019 trust in the police<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, the Trump administration\u2019s approach to immigration, manipulating existing laws and often straight-up violating them, is not exactly new. Disturbing reports of abuse<\/a> at immigration detention centers surfaced under the Biden administration, problematic family detention tactics<\/a> were used by the Obama administration, and Trump\u2019s first administration pursued a notorious zero-tolerance policy<\/a> that resulted in thousands of parents being deported while their children remained in the U.S.\u00a0\u201cOur system makes no sense whatsoever and serves nobody\u2019s interests,\u201d Shuchart said. \u201cThe only thing that\u2019s ever going to work is legislation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shuchart believes the Trump administration\u2019s solution, which has thus far included firing staff, eliminating guardrails, and throwing billions more dollars at an overwhelmed agency so it can meet the president\u2019s mass deportation goal as quickly as possible, is pure fantasy. The situation facing DHS and all the agencies it oversees is begging for a policy intervention that outlines real leadership and a plan, something money cannot buy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[377],"tags":[23,5,14682,13786,14788,22996,14683,2494,22999,22998,22997],"class_list":{"0":"post-129900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-hockey","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-immigration","11":"tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement","12":"tag-immigration-enforcement","13":"tag-immigration-law","14":"tag-kristi-noem","15":"tag-law-enforcement","16":"tag-mass-deportation","17":"tag-proud-boys","18":"tag-scott-shuchart"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/114872219344317688","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}