US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rapid recruitment and expansion has led to an influx of employees with questionable qualifications, an investigation has found. The track records of some new recruits amid the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda stand out for all the wrong reasons.
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, and a job candidate who once failed to graduate from a police academy and 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.
Claire Trickler-McNulty, who served as an ICE official during the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations, said: “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.”
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. The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged some applicants received “tentative selection letters” and offers to begin working on a temporary status before they had been subjected to full background checks.
