Policy / January 27, 2026
ICE lowered standards to facilitate a massive hiring spree. Most new hires are clearly unqualified. Are some also white supremacists or domestic terrorists?
An ICE recruiting poster displayed in Arlington, Texas, in the middle of a major recruiting event in that city.
(Ron Jenkins/Getty Images) The Department of Homeland Security recently bragged about having hired more than 12,000 ICE officers and agents in just four months — a feat that simply required lowering standards, speeding up the processing of barely vetted recruits, and making availability the primary eligibility requirement. That’s an exaggeration, but barely. More than doubling the ICE ranks means reduce training from 13 weeks to sixincreasing the maximum age limit 40 to none at all, remove the university degree requirement, and adding a $50,000 signing bonus. Now almost anyone can become an ICE agent. And it’s not just because of these lax standards, but also because DHS apparently does a poor job of ensuring that even these are met.
A Slate the journalist, for example, was offered an officer position despite never submitting documents, taking the fitness test, passing the drug screen, or submitting a background check. Last week it was revealed that summary-sorting AI tool by mistake reported many applicants as former law enforcement, accidentally putting them on a even shorter four-week training track, online only. ICE agent filmed fatally shooting Alex Pretti in the head execution-style has been identified by the AP as an eight-year veteran of the Border Patrol. Renee Good was needlessly fatally killed by an ICE agent who was on the job. for over a decadepreviously working in the Border Patrol. If veteran ICE agents are killing civilians on the streets, DHS’s negligence in screening new recruits should worry us all about who the agency is allowing to become emboldened with impunity.
“Clearly, there is a problem with compliance with use of force policies, even among people who are not hired by Trump, but were hired under earlier, more stringent standards at a more rigorous training academy.” Scott Shucharta senior policy adviser at ICE under the Biden administration told me. “When you relax all that, it’s hard to see how we could expect a higher level of performance from new recruits.”
Related article Among those sounding the alarm over who will become ICE agents is Rep. Jamie Raskin, who sent a letter this month to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, demanding access to ICE employment records and asking, “How many pardoned January 6 insurgents have been hired by your respective departments?” (The letter states that pardoned J6er Jared Wise was given a high-ranking position at the Department of Justice in Bondi.) This followed a letter sent to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari in July, which was signed by a dozen Democrats in the United States House of Representativeswhich asked whether new ICE recruits had been “vetted against lists of domestic terrorist organizations, such as the Proud Boys?” If the United States currently had a functioning public accountability structure, we could get answers to these questions. For now, these letters are met with a silence that is growing louder as ICE is deployed to more communities.
“I think any concerns you might have about the existing workforce would be greater when you relaxed hiring standards,” Shuchart told me. “You have created an infiltration opportunity for the insurgents.”
Insurgents and other right-wing extremists, such as Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three percent— all of which were seemingly everywhere, frighteningly, during Donald Trump’s first term, back when there were still guardrails preventing the president from amassing his own paramilitary force.
Current number
A number of recent incidents suggest that concerns about extremists within ICE are well-founded. In December, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report citing a U.S. citizen wrongly detained by ICE who told investigators he had “noticed that several officers had tattoos that expressed support for the Proud Boys.” Similarly, ICE recruits sent to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy in Brunswick, Georgia, without proper screening, “were found to have tattoos associated with gangs and white supremacists when they took off their shirts during training,” according to A Daily Mail report. An alleged whistleblower leaked names Among the 4,500 ICE agents and Border Patrol officers this month was Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys. He denied the allegation.
And there are other worrying things. An investigation carried out by the SPLC Hate Monitoring discovered that Trump’s ‘border czar,’ Tom Homan, met Proud Boys Affiliate and describes himself “Proud participant of J6Terry Newsome repeatedly throughout 2024, before and in the months following Trump’s election victory. On at least one occasion, the discussion turned to immigration policy and deportations, with Newsome, who is based in Chicago, boasting on social media that Homan had asked “Illinois politicians to follow me as a PoC” or “point of contact.”
There’s also the fact that ICE’s recruiting efforts seem overtly calibrated to attract the attention of white nationalists and other right-wing extremists. “DHS appears to be courting pardoned January 6 insurrectionists,” Raskin’s aforementioned missive notes. “He is using white nationalist ‘dog whistles’ in his recruitment campaign for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, which appear intended to incite members of extremist militias, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, who participated in the insurrection.” The agency’s white supremacist overtures include a tweeted poster of Uncle Sam under the caption “In which direction, American?”, a direct reference to the 1978 book In which direction is Western man?which is standard reading for neo-Nazis and other racists. DHS also republished artwork created and distributed by well-known white nationalist accounts, including a poster advising Americans to “Report all foreign invaders.” Just two days after Renee Good’s murder, DHS posted a recruiting ad with the message: “We will have our home again”, the title of a song beloved by racist “blood and soil” types. The Sacramento Proud Boys were