Trump wants to hire 10,000 new ICE agents. Is that goal doable?

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

WASHINGTON — President Trump says he wants to hire 10,000 new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents, but experts and the history of law enforcement hiring sprees suggest the process could be challenging, lengthy and possibly result in problematic hires.
The massive funding bill signed into law this month by Trump earmarks about $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement, including tens of billions for new deportation agents and other personnel. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, in a statement to The Times, said that the agency will deliver on the president's hiring directive.
'In June, our 2025 Career Expo successfully recruited 3,000 candidates and generated 1,000 tentative job offers — nearly double the 564 from 2023,' she wrote. 'Our recruitment strategy includes targeted outreach, thorough vetting and partnerships with state and local law enforcement.'
During his first term, when Trump called for ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to hire 15,000 people collectively, a July 2017 report by the Homeland Security inspector general found significant setbacks.
'Although DHS has established plans and initiated actions to begin an aggressive hiring surge, in recent years the Department and its components have encountered notable difficulties related to long hire times, proper allocation of staff, and the supply of human resources,' the report states.
The independent watchdog concluded that to meet the goal of 10,000 new immigration officers, ICE would need more than 500,000 applicants. For CBP to hire 5,000 new agents, it would need 750,000 applicants.
It doesn't appear either goal was met. In 2017, ICE hired 371 deportation officers from more than 11,000 applications and took 173 days on average to finalize hires, the news outlet Government Executive reported. And Cronkite News reported that when Trump left office in 2021, Border Patrol had shrunk by more than 1,000 agents.
'The mere mechanics of hiring that many people is challenging and takes time,' said John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University who studies U.S. incarceration and has researched the hiring challenges ICE faces.
When the initial version of the funding bill passed the House of Representatives, it laid out a target of at least 10,000 ICE officers, agents and support staff, specifying a minimum of 2,500 people in fiscal year 2025 and 1,875 people in each subsequent year through 2029.
The legislation didn't outline specific hiring goals for Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, though Homeland Security said that, in addition to the 3,000 Border Patrol agents, the funding will also support the hiring of 3,000 more customs officers at ports of entry.
The Senate modified the bill and on final passage, the law removed those hiring specifics, meaning ICE can use the funding for a variety of purposes. ICE has more than 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel. CBP has 60,000 employees, including about 19,000 Border Patrol agents.
Studies on accelerated hiring efforts have found that, in some cases, contracts were poorly managed. Ten months into a 2018 contract with the professional services firm Accenture, by which point CBP had paid $13.6 million, the inspector general found that just two people had accepted job offers.
Hiring thousands of employees would be an even bigger lift today, Pfaff said.
He pointed to the fact that since 2020, police departments nationwide have also struggled to recruit and retain officers. Immigration officer pay is lower than rookie salaries at big-city law enforcement agencies, such as the New York Police Department.
A job posting for a deportation officer offers a salary range of about $50,000 to $90,000. Pfaff compared that with NYPD, where officer salaries start at just over $60,000 and rise to more than $125,000 in less than six years.
Another recruitment push resulted in a wave of high-profile corruption cases.
During a Border Patrol hiring spree from 2006 to 2009, standards for hiring and training were lowered, about 8,000 agents were brought on. The Associated Press reported that the number of employees arrested for misconduct — such as civil rights violations or off-duty crimes like domestic violence — grew yearly between 2007 and 2012, reaching 336, or a 44% increase. More than 100 employees were arrested or charged with corruption, including taking bribes to smuggle drugs or people.
A 2015 report from an internal audit by a CBP advisory council said that 'arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.'
Josiah Heyman, an anthropology professor who directs the University of Texas at El Paso's Center of Inter-American and Border Studies, studied the mid-2000s hiring spree. He said smuggling organizations have only gotten more sophisticated since then, as have security measures, so it's more valuable for smugglers to 'buy someone off' instead of attempting to bring in people or drugs undetected.
Beyond corruption, Heyman said he worries the drive to quickly increase Homeland Security staffing could lead to Americans being deported, as well as an increase of assault and abuse cases and deaths of detainees.
'Getting 10,000 [new employees] means basically hiring the people who walk in the door because you're trying to hit your quota,' he said. 'Rapid, mass-hiring lends itself to mistakes and cutting corners.'
The recruitment issues at Border Patrol led to reforms, such as the Anti-Border Corruption Act of 2010, which included mandatory polygraph testing for job applicants (though that requirement was not implemented for ICE applicants). The polygraph tests revealed some applicants had concerning backgrounds, including some believed to have links to organized crime.
The reforms also slowed hiring as two-thirds of Border Patrol applicants began failing the polygraph exam by 2017, the Associated Press reported.
If the government is not able to hit its hiring goals, it might turn to contractors, the U.S. military and local law enforcement to help carry out Trump's aggressive crackdown on immigration. It is likely to continue its expansion of the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to function as deportation agents. Homeland Security said the new budget will fully fund the 287(g) program.
Pfaff said that while using local police to make immigration arrests could help in the short term, many major cities and states, including California, have already banned the agreements or limited cooperation with ICE. Still, ProPublica reported that more than 500 law enforcement agencies have signed 287(g) agreements since January.
Jason Houser, who was ICE's chief of staff under the Biden administration, said training new hires takes about a year and that classes are typically capped at 50 students.
Houser said another short-term workaround for permanent staff could be the use of contractors.
Most immigrant detainees are held in facilities that are run by private prison companies, including the Florida-based GEO Group and Tennessee-based CoreCivic.
But those companies have a limited inventory of detention space. CBP could also use its funding to erect soft-sided, temporary facilities on military bases within the 100 miles of the U.S. boundary, in which CBP has authority to conduct immigration checkpoints and other enhanced enforcement activities.
Houser said temporary facilities could be set up by October, and they could be staffed with National Guard or U.S. military personnel in administrative, nursing, food and sanitation roles.
Federal law generally prohibits the military from arresting civilians. But Homeland Security officials have said military personnel have the authority to temporarily detain anyone who attacks an immigration agent until law enforcement can arrest them.
But Houser worries that placing young service members, who aren't trained to conduct civil detention, in charge of those facilities will lead to people getting hurt. He also worries that without other countries agreeing to accept more deportees, the number of immigrants detained for months could quickly balloon.
As of June 29, there were nearly 58,000 immigrants held in detention, according to TRAC, a nonpartisan data research organization. That's far beyond the congressionally approved 41,500 detention beds this fiscal year.
'This is 9/11-style money,' Houser said. 'Think about the money in counterterrorism post-9/11. It turns the entire apparatus toward this goal. Everything in government is going to turn to where the money is, and that's the scary piece to me.'