$50k Bonuses, Reduced Age Minimums And Superman: How Ice Will Fill Its Ranks

Wartime-like recruitment posters. Sign-on bonuses of up to $50,000. Massive hiring events. Reduced age requirements. Superman.

It’s all been part of the Trump administration’s campaign to attract new applicants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And so far, it’s brought in more than 110,000 applications, ICE deputy director Madison Sheahan said in an interview with POLITICO. Thirty percent of applicants are military veterans and roughly 10 percent are coming from other federal law enforcement agencies, Sheahan said.

The administration’s targeting of law enforcement recruits comes amid fears from Democrats and immigration advocates that the Trump administration is going to rely on unqualified recruits to quickly fill the 10,000 new ICE agent jobs they got out of the GOP’s megabill.

“This is the first time ICE has ever had a major plus up. So the beauty of that is that we can learn from the best practices of other agencies,” Sheahan said. “That huge presence that we’re seeing from former military and former federal law enforcement — those are people that have been vetted their entire career and have done great work for this country their entire career. And so having them a part of our ranks is really going to be helpful when it comes to a lot of the criticism that we’re getting right now.”

The speed at which the agency executes the plus up — from 20,000 to 30,000 agents — is a delicate balance. Moving too quickly could amplify concerns that the agency didn’t thoroughly vet and train new agents at a time when ICE faces mounting scrutiny. But moving too slowly could delay the agency’s efforts to meet the White House’s goal of 3,000 daily arrests and 1 million annual deportations.

“We have an opportunity to do this throughout the president’s entire term, and we’ll continue to do that until our ranks are filled,” Sheahan said. “Obviously, the pressure is on nationwide for us to serve the American people, and so we want to make sure we deliver for them.”

ICE’s human resources department is sorting through the 110,000 applications, which include candidates interested in deportation officer roles, as well as for jobs as criminal investigators under Homeland Security Investigations and for attorneys and personnel in the agency’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, Sheahan said. As of July, the agency had issued over 1,000 offers to former ICE agents and officers who had left under the Biden administration — a number that has since grown, according to an ICE spokesperson.

The administration’s efforts to target law enforcement officers, particularly at the state and local level, for recruitment has frustrated local sheriffs. But for the administration, in addition to pushing back on the narrative of unqualified recruits, it also alleviates some of the pressure on vetting and training, given these candidates already come with experience.

The criticism facing the agency has reached a fever pitch in recent months, as Democrats, immigration advocates and lawyers decry everything from the masking of agents to ICE’s aggressive tactics to increase arrest numbers — with a number of polls showing the agency’s decreasing popularity among Americans. A July Quinnipiac University poll found that 57 percent of voters disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration law, while another from CNN that same month showed that 53 percent of Americans opposed increasing ICE’s budget by billions of dollars.

And now, as concerns circulate about the agency’s ramp-up, experts are comparing this moment to the rapid build-up of Customs and Border Protection after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States under former President George W. Bush. At that time, the hiring process raised questions about the administration’s standards and led to corruption and misconduct at the agency.

“The last thing you want is somebody who has no law enforcement experience whatsoever and is gung ho about working for ICE under Trump,” said Scott Shuchart, a former senior ICE official during the Biden administration. “That’s the worst of all worlds.”

It’s why some administration officials and Trump allies are warning that no one should expect the number of new agents to increase as fast as the Trump administration has been able to tout new recruitment numbers. The hiring blitz requires building out ICE’s human resources department to help sort through the thousands of new applications, officer trainings, office space, vehicles and weapons — a huge undertaking.

“We’re trying to be judicious. We’re background checking people. We’re not taking crazies,” said a Trump administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “There’s this myth out there that we’re just taking everybody, and we decline a lot of positions.”

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