Inside the ICE Hiring Blitz

0:05We are in Brunswick, Georgia, which is sort of the southeast corner of Georgia, at the federal law enforcement training center where all the ICE officers get trained. A couple of weeks ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, invited a handful of reporters to one of its training academies. One of those reporters was our colleague Michelle Hackman. And we had this six-hour tour where they showed us like all sorts of different bells and whistles of all the types of classes and training that these deportation officers go through. And was there sort of a demonstration or a session that stuck with you?

0:41There was one in particular that really stuck with me. It was sort of the elite ICE deportation officer unit that carries out some of the most high-profile and dangerous raids. and what they did was they brought us on a little bus to this mock neighborhood. They told us it was a whole 30-acre pretend neighborhood with houses and fake shops and all that stuff. Like a set. Like a set, like a movie set, exactly. And we parked in front of this house in a cul-de-sac and they were like, okay, stand back. And this armored vehicle pulls up in front of the house.

1:25and 12 guys loaded out they ran at the house they like pounded on the door really loud and shouted you know we're police open up open up and a few seconds later they set off a flash bang and then they sort of broke down the door, ran in and like scattered. You know, basically they were trying to show us what it's like for them to practice searching a house. This kind of work is meant to appeal to new recruits. ICE is in the middle of a major hiring spree with the goal of enlisting 10 ,000 new deportation officers by the end of the year. It's an unprecedented hiring push, one that ICE says is key to pulling off President Trump's mass deportation agenda.

2:17Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, September 2nd.

2:30Coming up on the show, inside the campaign to recruit thousands of ICE deportation officers.

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3:49During Trump's re-election campaign, he talked a lot about carrying out mass deportations of immigrants in the country illegally. But Michelle says that since Trump started his second term, the White House's efforts have stalled. They've said we want to deport a million people in Trump's first year in office. And right now, they're not even close to that. And so Trump and the White House have realized that in order to actually pull off what they're promising, they're going to need many, many, many more people helping out with the deportations. According to Michelle's reporting, the Trump administration is on track to deport between 400 ,000 and 500 ,000 people by the end of the year, which is around half their stated goal.

4:31To grow those numbers, ICE is recruiting more agents. and it's leaning on the increased funding that Congress gave it under the big GOP tax bill. ICE has tens of billions of dollars in cash all of a sudden because of the one big beautiful bill. It's suddenly the best-funded law enforcement agency in the country, more than the FBI, more than the Secret Service. And they have roughly speaking 6 ,000 deportation officers on staff. That's basically been the size of ICE since it's been founded. And they're looking to almost triple that by the end of this year, which is a really fast timeline to hire a bunch of new law enforcement.

5:14What is ICE's pitch to get more recruits? Well, there are two things here. First of all, the administration is offering a lot of incentives for people to come. The most notable one is that they're offering people a$50 ,000 signing bonus. that's so much more money than you can make in local law enforcement or even in other federal law enforcement jobs that they are recruiting a lot of people who maybe wouldn't have thought about being an ICE officer before this. They're also recruiting a lot of people away from local police departments, from other agencies. ICE has put out a bunch of ads on social media.

5:53Some of the images mimic vintage wartime posters. And the agency's website shows Uncle Sam with the phrase America Needs You. And ICE also got Dean Cain involved, the actor who played Superman in the 90s, to drum up support for the recruitment effort. So if you want to help save America, ICE is arresting the worst of the worst and removing them from America's streets. I like that. I voted for that. They need your help. We need your help to protect our homeland. The other thing is that people are generally often, speaking, politically motivated to work for ICE. They really believe in the mission.

6:33In the past, people applying to be a deportation officer had to be between 21 and 40 years old. ICE is now allowing folks in their 60s to join, as long as they can still pass physical exams. At the same time, ICE is accepting applicants as young as 18, and people without a college degree or any kind of law enforcement experience.

6:57So do we know, has there been an uptick in recruitment? So it's hard to say because we don't have old recruitment numbers, but yeah, the administration is out there boasting that they have more than 120 ,000 applicants, enough that they've told us we can afford to be picky. The training facility Michelle got to tour last month is called FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. It's in Brunswick, a small town along the coast of southern Georgia that's dotted with swamps and live oak trees. Recruits go there to learn how to work for ICE. What are ICE agents supposed to know how to do, right?

7:34Like, what is the goal of this training and how is it different from, say, a local police officer? The really big thing is that ICE officers, they have a very specific set of laws that they're enforcing, immigration laws. And so they've got to understand all these scenarios of when is it okay for me to suspect that someone's in the country illegally and actually arrest them? And so a lot of the time is just really boring classroom instruction in the law. But that was not the focus of the tour of the facility that you went on. They really were leaning in and emphasizing, on our tour at least, emphasizing the sort of, for lack of a better way to say it, like the bang bang of aspects of being in law enforcement.

8:22Almost, in some ways, what makes it cool to people to be a deportation officer. You know, you get to carry a big gun and you get to drive a car really fast. Over the course of about six hours, Michelle and other reporters were bused from one building to the next throughout the vast training campus. Michelle sat in a police car as the siren blared, and an instructor showcased how recruits are trained to drive at high speeds and maneuver winding roads. Dispatch, unit 4, show me en route. Copy 4, show me en route, 1410. Reporters also saw dozens of students line up in a large indoor firing range.

8:56Instructors talked over loudspeakers as students shot at paper targets. Three seconds. Three rounds. Two-handed. Referencing your doctor. Be ready.

9:11And the tour featured a timed obstacle course the recruits have to complete as part of their physical training. He's about to, oh wow, he's about to start. So he's climbing a six-foot wall. He just swung himself over. Now he's crawling through this, like, underpass space thing. And what he's about to do is he has to, like, jump through a window. and he's got to be able to handle... The demonstrations Michelle saw focused on the most dramatic parts of training ICE agents, the stuff that could get new recruits excited to join the agency. Now, as ICE's deadline of one million deportations by the end of Trump's first year is approaching, the agency is aiming to get new hires out in the field as quickly as possible.

9:49And that's meant scaling back how much training students get. Michelle talked to some former ICE officials who say that could be a risk, potentially deploying new agents who are underqualified and undertrained. That's after the break.

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11:17Beyond hiring thousands of new agents by the end of the year, ICE also wants to deploy new recruits throughout the country ASAP. So the agency is shortening its training program. It's cutting back on classroom and firearms instruction. Overall, the in-person training required to join ICE has been slashed in half. Standard deportation officer training was about 16 weeks. Now it's about eight on campus. And Todd Lyons, the acting director who was with us on the tour, told us that, you know, what they've done partially is they've added some more training remotely before people arrive and after they are placed in their offices.

11:58but I think it remains to be seen whether that amount of training is enough. ISIS head of training, Caleb Vitello, brought up another way they're scaling back. Here he is during the tour of the training facility. One of the big cuts we made was the Spanish program. We've got a lot of questions about that. That was a five-week program. They're getting rid of Spanish training. You know, before, in order to become a deportation officer, you had to take a five-week full-time Spanish proficiency course. And they've decided that's not necessary anymore. They've replaced it with an app on people's phones that acts as translation software.

12:34So as deportation officers are making a live arrest, they can use a translation app. We purchased the translation service, right? And now that's available for everybody in the field that will hit all of those languages. So in that, like, it looks like we cut out five weeks, but we didn't really because we replaced it with something else in the field that is actually so much more efficient. Why did they say they chose that, the Spanish language training in particular? Why take that out of the curriculum, especially considering that's something that might be useful if you're apprehending people who are only Spanish speakers?

13:07You know, they told us that it's because they thought the Spanish training wasn't that good to begin with. And people were graduating and they were still not really good Spanish speakers. And, you know, they pointed out this translation software can do more than Spanish. It can do Creole. It can do really any language that they need. Has anyone raised concerns about this shortened training? Oh, many people. I think especially former ICE officials who feel like, you know, they've really carefully crafted this training and now it's being sort of in some ways chopped up and shortened. Michelle says former officials and immigration experts have pointed to another time when the government tried this kind of massive recruitment push.

13:46That was after 9-11, when Border Patrol hired thousands of new agents. To increase recruitment numbers, Border Patrol lowered its standards around who qualified for the job. And as a result, there have been lots of studies done on this, including government reports, and they found those agents who were hired were much likelier themselves to either get arrested, you know, have civil rights violations filed against them. And so, you know, people have that in mind when they're thinking about how is ICE going to pull this off without a repeat of that incident.

14:23I said throughout the tour that they were not compromising on the standard of training. Here's acting director Todd Lyons. I think on that, one of my things that I really held my ground on, the fact that I wasn't going to water down training, right? Like I said, having gone through it myself, I know exactly what we need. Caleb has done a great job of not necessarily shorting it, but streamlining it, right? He was like, you know, our guys still have to meet the same physical standard. They still have to pass all the same exams. Sure, we've made the training a little bit shorter, but he feels that it's not really a compromise on the quality of the training.

15:00ICE says that to keep up with recruitment, the agency is aiming to more than double the number of instructors at the FLETC Academy. And recruits are also undergoing new training exercises, inspired by recent violent encounters during protests. So they told us that they're actually changing training constantly to respond to what they say is sort of an increased threat level in the field. So they brought up the L.A. protests when people started throwing rocks or using tear gas or things like that at ICE officers. And they said now every new ICE officer is being issued a helmet and a gas mask. They've told us that there are more instances of people's cars getting rammed.

15:38And so they've built that scenario, for example, into officer driving training, things like that. As the agency is thinking more about anti-ICE protests, it's leaning into training for those elite agents you heard earlier, the ones that carry out those high-stakes raids. They're called special response teams. They're trained a little bit more like FBI agents to do sort of high-risk, high-profile type raids. They have extra training. You know, they know how to do the thing where they break down a door and set off a flashbang. And, you know, there are some real instances. I mean, they were sent to deal with the L.A.

16:17protests when the protests did start to get violent. That was the special response team that got sent in. And is there a sense that we're going to see more of that? I definitely think so. I mean, there is a reason they showed it to us and they refused to give us numbers. But I think there's definitely a sense that they want to increase the numbers of people on that team. This is really remarkable because we've already started to see a growing number of ICE agents deployed to major cities in the U.S., including here in D.C., where you and I live and work. That's right. I see them. Yes, I see them out my window.

16:50Yeah. I mean, have you talked to people about how they've been experiencing that? Yeah, there is a perception that ICE is everywhere now. And it's not entirely unfounded because ICE is now has switched its strategy to primarily performing what they call at-large arrests. So, you know, a street arrest, people being arrested at their workplace, at their home, outside a school. And so that means it's a lot more visible. And ultimately, their goal is to get people to self-deport. And so the fact that they are out there making very public arrests is not an image that they're shying away from. Michelle, you've been covering immigration and immigration policy for years at this point.

17:34What is your takeaway from seeing all the changes that ICE is making? I guess my big takeaway is that they are doing literally everything in their power, like so much more creativity than I could have even imagined, to try to make this promise of a mass deportation possible. And it makes me think that maybe really eventually they will actually do something resembling a mass deportation.

18:17That's all for today, Tuesday, September 2nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. Thank you.