ICE is an agency whose recruiting and training standards are so low that other federal law enforcement agents say pejoratively that ICE is “hired by the pound, from the pound.”
CBP — the nation’s largest law enforcement agency — has been plagued for two decades by a tidal wave of crime, corruption, and misconduct driven by a disastrous post-9/11 hiring surge that flooded the force with thousands of agents and officers who never should have been given a badge and a gun — including, as one CBP commissioner told me, even accidentally hiring members of actual drug cartels.
Part I: The History
On September 11, 2001, immigration was the purview of the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service while border trade and travel was the responsibility of the Treasury Department’s US Customs Service.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and as part of the creation of DHS and the massive reshuffling of government, both INS and Customs were broken apart. ICE brought together the “legacy INS” deportation and detention officers, which were renamed as what’s now known as Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), as well as the “legacy INS” and “legacy Customs” special agents to form the Homeland Security Investigations division, HSI.
Problem #1: A Hiring Surge Gone Wrong
The agency’s own studies concluded the Border Patrol did not have “operational control” over 97 percent of the border.
Altogether, the border was so porous that in 2000, a three-ton American elephant named Benny appeared in a Mexico City circus, only for US authorities to discover there was no record he’d ever crossed the border.
During the eight years of the Bush administration, the Border Patrol surged from 9,200 agents in 2001 to some 18,000 agents — and eventually peaked in the Obama administration at 21,000 agents. Add in the officers of the Office of Field Operations and the air and marine officers, and CBP had a gun-carrying workforce of about 45,000 agents and officers.
...in the post-9/11 reorganization, we created the nation’s largest law enforcement agency and didn’t give it the power to have the internal affairs capacity that one would expect at even a mid-size local police department.
Problem #3: Tradition and Culture
This is an agency that is uniquely callous about human lives — both of US citizens and migrants.
since 2010, CBP agents have been involved in at least 72 deadly shootings or use of force incidents.
Agents are emboldened in their use-of-force by a sense that there will never be consequences for doing so. Roughly 96 or 97 percent of complaints against Border Patrol historically have gone nowhere. In fact, across a four-year period from 2012-2015 that included 2,178 complaints that warranted investigation, just eleven resulted in an agent’s temporary suspension and eleven more resulted in a reprimand.
The Entirely Predictable Result:
In 2016, in the final months of the Obama administration — a period that represented the peak of reform and professionalization efforts at CBP — an outside advisory group headed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton concluded, “The CBP discipline system is broken.”
CBP’s arrest and misconduct rate is FIVE TIMES higher than other federal law enforcement agencies. CBP’s corruption problem was so bad that, according to what two CBP officials told me, DHS leadership under Janet Napolitano ordered CBP to change its definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the problem.
A Brief History of ICE
For most of its roughly 20 years of existence, ICE has faced a clear problem — there are way way way more undocumented immigrants in the United States than Congress funded ICE to find, arrest, and deport. For many years, ICE was budgeted for around 400,000 deportations.
ICE’s ERO side has long relied upon and focused heavily on what’s known as “prosecutorial discretion.” Under that strategy, ICE ERO mostly focused on deporting people with a so-called “final order of removal” — e.g., people who had exhausted all the legal process and ignored the binding decision of the immigration courts to leave the country — or people with criminal records
The strategy of discretion worked. By 2011, nearly half of the 400,000 people deported by ICE had a criminal conviction, up from a third in 2008.
Part II: What’s Changed
Today, that “prosecutorial discretion” is out the window. Last spring, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller set an arbitrary target of one million deportations a year — which translates into immigration officers making 3,000 arrests a day.
That shift is reflected in how most people now detained by ICE have no criminal record. A CATO Institute roundup in November found that “nearly three in four (73 percent) had no criminal conviction” and just “5 percent had a violent criminal conviction.”
Part III: What’s To Come
The goal for growing ICE with 10,000 new officers is both a larger total number than the Border Patrol tried to hire during its surge and also represents a larger total percentage of the existing ICE force. ICE is set to receive $30 billion in new funding for this hiring surge.
Moreover, we should have specific fresh concerns about WHO is applying for these new jobs at ICE and CBP, which also has plans to hire thousands of new agents. After 9/11, the Border Patrol played on patriotism in its recruiting. Today, DHS and ICE are relying are explicitly white nationalist rhetoric and imagery in their promotion materials.
ICE proved that it’s building a Trump cult of personality as much as hiring for a law enforcement agency — it cut its previous five-month training academy to just 47 days, a period chosen, according to what three officials told The Atlantic, “because Trump is the 47th president.” ICE is no longer interviewing candidates before hiring them and swearing them in virtually, promising that it’ll catch up on their background checks later, CNN reported. The training has already been cut a second time to just 42 days to speed getting officers into the field.
Lastly, news headlines are also beginning to feel eerily familiar about what the early warning signs of CBP’s tidal wave of misconduct and criminality looked like in the late 2000s. There are major warning signs that ICE’s workforce has a similar misconduct problem today
Furthermore, there are two specific new concerns I see looming on the horizon that I have not addressed previously in today’s testimony.
First is ICE and CBP’s giant investment and deployment of surveillance technologies — some of which have been leading to mistaken arrests in the field and much of which, as currently envisioned, is not consistent with policing in a free society. ICE is extensively using data-mining and facial recognition technologies with little public understanding of the safeguards behind their use. In particular, there’s a facial recognition app called “Mobile Fortify,” which ICE is using and claiming is the “be-all-and-end-all” of whether someone is in the United States legally. There are multiple documented instances where this app has returned false or contradictory information and yet ICE has relied on it to make detentions and arrests.
Second, I have not spoken much about ICE’s detention centers; the Trump administration and ICE are in the midst of enormously ambitious plans to double the capacity of detention facilities, from about 55,000 beds to more than 107,000 beds, as part of the plan to pour about $45 billion into detention facilities. I would expect and predict that over the course of 2026, we will see this plan become the center of new scandals.
This doesn’t change unless we demand change and make it change — the way that the funding for ICE has been allocated, it can spend this money straight through 2029. Congress is going to have to act to turn that funding and hiring spigot off — otherwise, this continues on autopilot for the next four years. But the damage we are doing to our own country is long-lasting. Remember we are two decades removed from the start of the CBP hiring surge and I can still find you a news story or headline every single day that traces its origins back to the mistakes made in that surge.
We as a nation must act to change the trajectory of immigration enforcement in our country.
America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year — let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.
= new reply since forum marked as read
