ICE Hiring Spree Brings Questionable Recruits

WASHINGTON — President Trump's Big Beautiful Bill flooded Immigration and Customs Enforcement with $75 billion in new funding. The money has allowed the agency to offer up to $50,000 signing bonuses in a rush to staff up with enough agents to carry out deportations at the scale the administration demands.

However, while the agency has seen a massive spike in applicants, the haste to onboard agents is proving disastrous. The Department of Homeland Security announced last month that ICE had received more than 150,000 applications and that the agency had "made more than 18,000 tentative job offers to patriotic Americans who want to help remove murderers, gang members, pedophiles, terrorists, and rapists from the U.S."

However, the agency appears to have enrolled new recruits before completing background checks, thereby breaking its own policy. So far, more than 200 recruits have been dismissed from the training program after failing to meet requirements. Nearly half of the recruits failed open-book written exams, while ten had criminal or drug-related issues.

The agency has cut what had been a five-month training academy to just 47 days and is no longer interviewing candidates before hiring them, swearing them in virtually before completing background checks. More than a third of the recruits failed the very modest physical fitness test, which requires 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and running 1.5 miles in 14 minutes or less.