Former Department of Homeland Security officials and employees are raising the alarm that the Trump administration\u2019s 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\u2019 current behavior could attract prospective agents for the wrong reasons.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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<\/a> officers.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> (which includes a \u201ckneel\/stand test,\u201d 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\u2019t even require a high school education.<\/p>\n John Sandweg, who served as the acting director of ICE from 2013 to 2014, told Salon that he\u2019s concerned that the current conduct of the agency under Trump could also attract candidates for the \u201cwrong reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n ICE, as part of Trump\u2019s mass deportation scheme, has been accused<\/a> of using racial<\/a> 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<\/a>, like in California earlier this month when masked federal agents \u2014 \u00a0brandishing firearms and deploying chemical irritants and flash bang grenades \u2014\u00a0clashed<\/a> with protesters.<\/p>\n \u201cI do worry that in this kind of supercharged environment we\u2019re in, there are going to be some people who want to get into this for the wrong reasons, and that\u2019s not because they\u2019re trying to make the country safer, but maybe some bias and hatred towards immigrants generally,\u201d Sandweg said. \u201cThat\u2019s the concern, that and lowering the bar in terms of picking people who would otherwise normally be disqualified and bringing them on board.\u201d<\/p>\n Sandweg said that, in his experience at the agency, ICE agents are, \u201cby and large, a very high-quality group\u201d and that most of the people \u201csigned up to make the country safer.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a really good parallel,\u201d Sandweg said.\u201cThe Trump administration now has funding to double the size of ICE, and unquestionably, they\u2019re going to want to deploy those assets as quickly as humanly possible. I would expect them to put ICE under tremendous pressure to deploy\u00a0 these agents and officers quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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<\/a> for pilots in 2018 and one of their physical fitness tests the same year<\/a>.<\/p>\n Jason Houser, who served as the chief of staff of ICE under former President Barack Obama, said that he shared many of Sandweg\u2019s concerns in terms of the practical hurdles and the potential for lower standards, whether it be in recruitment or training, for new ICE agents.<\/p>\n Houser also raised a different issue facing the administration, which is that there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201csecuring\u201d a candidate.<\/p>\n \u201cWith any job in federal law enforcement, 10 to 15 to 20% of candidates they\u2019re 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\u2019ve exposed online. You know, these are the candidates that need to be whittled out,\u201d Houser said.<\/p>\n Houser told Salon, however, that he expects the Trump administration might lean on private contractors for more than just recruitment.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I believe they\u2019re going to do is in the near term, I think they\u2019re going to look to Blackwater-type companies, contract firms, to bring on staff that have law enforcement \u2018credentials\u2019 to augment deportation officers,\u201d Houser said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent and activist, told Salon that as a senior patrol agent and a critic of the agency, she\u2019s observed a connection between low hiring standards and criminality and abuse among officers.<\/p>\n A 2019 report corroborated this observation through a review of internal agency documents, which found that Border Patrol agents were about five times<\/a> as likely to be arrested as state and local law enforcement. The same year, ProPublica uncovered<\/a> 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<\/a> shows that criminal arrests among CBP officers and Border Patrol reached a five-year high in 2018.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Budd also pointed to individuals like Dana Thornhill, a former Border Patrol agent<\/a> who was convicted of sexually abusing minors, as the sort of person that stringent hiring standards and oversight would theoretically keep out.<\/p>\n Start your day with essential news from Salon. 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\u2019s ostensible goal of reducing crime.<\/p>\n \u201cFewer than 5,000<\/a> people were held in the immigration detention system in the 1980s per day, but now, 56,494<\/a> people are being detained by ICE nationally, as of the latest data from June 10,\u201d Russell said, identifying the post-9\/11 creation of DHS and ICE as a key moment in this process.<\/p>\n \u201cNone of these expansion initiatives have proven effective in the long run or useful in the short run \u2014apart from separating families and causing significant individual suffering,\u201d Russell argued, citing academic<\/a> research<\/a> showing immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than American citizens. \u201cAnd recent demographic research has found that crime rates drop when immigration increases \u2014 the share of immigrants in the country\u2019s population doubled between 1980 and 2022, and in that same time period<\/a>, the national crime rate dropped by 60.4 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n In Houser\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the immigration system, from someone leaving their home in Venezuela and coming to this country seeking a pathway, ICE\u2019s 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\u2019s what we hope they do,\u201d Houser said. \u201cPeople that don\u2019t have that training, that don\u2019t have the respect for law enforcement, that have never carried a weapon for this country \u2014 like Stephen Miller \u2014 are putting quotas, arrest quotas, on ICE officers.\u201d<\/p>\n The long and short of it, according to Houser, is that ICE won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWearing a badge comes with a great deal of trust and, you know, responsibility, and some people aren\u2019t equipped to have that, and that\u2019s what those screening processes are [for],\u201d Houser said. \u201cDoing away with that, you\u2019re going to have an influx of bad actors.\u201d<\/p>\n ICE did not respond to a request for comment from Salon.<\/p>\n The post ICE is about to go on a hiring spree<\/a> appeared first on Salon.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Department of Homeland Security officials and employees are raising the alarm that the Trump administration\u2019s plan to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[377],"tags":[24589,24584,23162,24588,24590,5,9950,13786,24587,24586,2494,24585,24591],"class_list":{"0":"post-138991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-hockey","8":"tag-background-check","9":"tag-border-patrol","10":"tag-department-of-homeland-security","11":"tag-federal-agents","12":"tag-hiring-process","13":"tag-hockey","14":"tag-ice-agents","15":"tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement","16":"tag-jason-houser","17":"tag-john-sandweg","18":"tag-law-enforcement","19":"tag-the-trump-administration","20":"tag-wrong-reasons"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/114920616750357460","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138991","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=138991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Sign up for our free morning newsletter<\/a>, Crash Course.<\/p>\n