Rapid recruitment and expansion by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has led to an influx of employees with questionable qualifications, an investigation has found.
The track records of some of the new recruits amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda stand out – and not in a good way.
They include characteristics such as two bankruptcies and six law enforcement jobs in three years, an allegation of lying in a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman – an incident that led to a $75,000 settlement and criticism of the recruit’s integrity – and a job candidate who once failed to graduate from a police academy, then lasted only three weeks in his only job as a police officer.
The common bond is that all were hired recently by ICE during an unprecedented hiring spree – 12,000 new officers and special agents to double its force – after the agency received a $75bn windfall from Congress to enact Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
The US president put a premium on swift action, and for ICE that meant rapid-fire recruitment and hiring, which in turn led to new employees with questionable qualifications. Their backgrounds and training have come under scrutiny after numerous high-profile incidents in which ICE agents used excessive force.
“If vetting is not done well and it’s done too quickly, you have higher risk of increased liability to the agency because of bad actions, abuse of power and the lack of ability to properly carry out the mission because people don’t know what they are doing,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, who served as an ICE official during the Obama, the first Trump and the Biden administrations.
The agency has said the majority of new hires are police and military veterans. But evidence is mounting that applicants with questionable histories were either not fully vetted before they were brought on or were hired in spite of their past, an investigation by the Associated Press found.
Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director who is stepping down at the end of May, said during a congressional hearing in February that he was proud of the hiring campaign, which drew more than 220,000 applications. “This expansion of a well-trained and well-vetted workforce will help further ICE’s ability to execute the president’s and secretary’s bold agenda,” he said.
Unlike many local law enforcement agencies, ICE said it shields the identity of employees to protect them from harassment, making a full accounting of the new hires impossible.
The AP focused on more than 40 officers who recently made public their new jobs as ICE officers on LinkedIn pages, using public records to check their backgrounds. All but one were male.
While most of them had conventional qualifications as former correctional officers, security
