As the deadline imposed by the immigrant-averse Trump administration to hire 10,000 new ICE agents by year’s end to carry out the president’s goal of deporting one million people annually nears, many government insiders are growing concerned about the frantic pace of recruitment coupled with the lowering of training standards for would-be Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers led by Kristi Noem.
ICE has placed new recruits into its training program before they’ve been fully vetted, one current and two former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials told NBC News, only to later discover that some failed drug tests, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or pose other security concerns.
Other recruits — some lured by ads promising $50,000 signing bonuses and forgiven student loan debt — who showed up at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Brunswick, Georgia, haven’t been able to meet the physical or academic requirements to serve.
More than a third of new recruits have failed the physical fitness test, The Atlantic reported, during which recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes to pass.
An email from ICE headquarters to the agency’s top officials on October 5 lamented that “a considerable amount of athletically allergic candidates” who reported for training had “misrepresented” their physical condition on application forms.
“We even had a 469-pound man sent to the academy whose own doctor certified him not at all fit for any activity,” a DHS official told the Daily Mail, which published an investigation into ICE’s lax vetting and declining training standards this week.
The ICE training academy recently eliminated the sit-up requirement because so many students couldn’t handle them and substituted a sprint challenge, the outlet learned.
Many of the new recruits, some straight out of high school, are faring no better on the academic side of training.
“We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English,” the DHS official said.
Nearly half the recruits over a three-month period through October were later sent home because they couldn’t pass the written exam, according to data released by the training center. The academic requirements include an exam at the end of a legal course on the Fourth Amendment (covering dos and don’ts of search and seizure) and immigration law.
Historically, ICE recruits have undergone a 16-week training course that includes the physical and academic components, as well as firearms and driving, wrote Thaddeus Johnson, a former police officer and a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, in an opinion piece for USA Today this week.
To expedite the expansion of its applicant pool, ICE has shrunk the training time to just 6 weeks and scrapped a requirement that recruits complete a five-week basic Spanish course, which is important because at least two-thirds of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. are from Spanish-speaking countries, Johnson noted.
“Instead, ICE recruits now rely on translation apps, which can introduce delays and confusion during stressful encounters,” he observed.
In August, ICE decided to widen its age requirements, which used to require applicants to be at least 21 years old and no older than 37 to 40, depending on the job. Now, ICE has opened its doors to recruits aged 18 to 65.
That’s now allowing the agency to recruit former and retired law enforcement officers, who are not required to attend the FLETC training program but still have to pass medical and fitness tests and background checks. ICE claims that as many as 85% of new recruits have a law enforcement background, so the relatively high failure rate of its other trainees doesn’t reflect the overall competence and readiness of its deportation force.
“Even those who identify as former law enforcement, they’re not being properly vetted and require basic training,” one official said.
Since the recruitment surge began in July, 584 recruits have failed out of the academy as of Dec. 1, while 558 graduated, and another 620 were still in training, according to records reviewed by the Daily Mail.
Among them were recruits discovered to have tattoos associated with gangs and white supremacists, and, remarkably, one student who asked to be excused from class so he could attend a court date on a gun charge.
Another recruit, 29-year-old Darien Coleman, was arrested by county police for allegedly arguing with a FLETC bus driver and smashing his phone, according to records obtained by the Daily Mail.
Sources told the outlet that while ICE does appear to be on track to meet its target of 10,000 new hires this month, as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem proclaimed at a cabinet meeting this week, many of those recruits won’t be street-ready or even trained to fully conduct arrests.
“They’re just trying to process them in as quickly as possible to say that we have people operational,” a DHS official said. “Anything that they think may have a pulse, they’re moving through.”
The fast-tracking of a reported 200,000 applicants this year to end up with a total of 16,000 ICE officers ready to facilitate President Trump’s goal of deporting 3,000 people a day has some lawmakers concerned about how prepared and professional these officers are.
Among them is Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee. In October, he sent a letter to Noem outlining ICE agent misconduct over the past year, including “unlawful arrests by scores of masked and unidentified federal agents” — of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike — and multiple incidents involving excessive force and “cruel, unlawful and unprofessional actions.”
“The loosening of hiring standards and training requirements is unacceptable and will likely result in increased officer misconduct — similar to or worse than what occurred during a small surge in hiring U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in the early 2000s,” Durbin wrote. “Exacerbating our concerns, DHS has gutted offices responsible for overseeing ICE officers and ensuring accountability for use-of-force incidents.”
Durbin told Noem that “greater congressional oversight of ICE’s hiring is essential,” and asked her to supply records detailing changes to ICE recruitment, eligibility and training requirements, including whether applicants participated “in the January 6, 2021 insurrection or are members of extremist groups such as white nationalist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant, anti-government, nihilistic, or other groups that advocate violent extremist ideologies.”
For former law enforcement recruits, Durbin asked for data on those who were cited or disciplined for misconduct in their previous position. He also wants Noem to outline the current mechanisms to monitor disciplinary actions, complaints, or misconduct involving newly hired personnel.
As ICE this week descended upon New Orleans, the latest Democratic city targeted by Trump, New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno, who will begin her term in January as the city’s first Latina and Mexican-born mayor, criticized immigration enforcement tactics during surges in other cities in an interview with CNN.
“It’s one thing if you would have a real strategic approach on going after people … who have criminal felonies or are being accused of some very serious and violent crimes. But that’s not what the public is seeing,” Moreno said. “They’re seeing people who are just trying to survive and do the right thing — and many of them now have American children who are not causing problems in our community — treated like they are violent, violent criminals.”
ICE agents have reportedly detained and arrested dozens of Spanish-speaking immigrants and native U.S. citizens at bus stops, shopping centers, and Home Depot and Lowe’s store parking lots in New Orleans over the past two days, and terrorized whole immigrant communities.
Louisiana lawmakers have also made it a crime to “hinder, delay, prevent, or otherwise interfere with or thwart” federal immigration enforcement, and those in violation could face fines and up to a year in jail, the Washington Post reported. Some mutual aid organizations in New Orleans have been directing people to buy whistles similar to those used in other cities to warn residents about the presence of ICE, but others have not, anticipating immigration agents or local police may classify the use of whistles as obstruction.
On Wednesday, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, a New Orleans-based nonprofit, against Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and other officials, alleging the state law is unconstitutional because it violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments “by criminalizing protected speech.”
Such developments underscore the need for the newly-deployed ICE recruits, among them, to have paid attention during their lightning-fast legal training.
