ICE is about to go on a hiring spree

Former Department of Homeland Guard authorities and employees are raising the alarm that the Trump administration s plan to hire more immigration enforcement officers could conclusion in lower hiring standards as expansions have in the past and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers current behavior could attract prospective agents for the wrong reasons As part of its campaign to hire new ICE personnel the Trump administration has presented a smattering of offers including a yearly bonus for agents over the next four years a signing bonus to former ICE agents who decide to return to the agency and a starting salary of up to for new officers Combined with the fact that ICE agents are not required to take any pre-employment exams have no educational requirements and are only required to pass a background check and a physical exam which includes a kneel stand test five minutes of cardio and performing pushups in two minutes the job offers a better salary and benefits than several especially considering it doesn t even require a high school schooling Related ICE s billion windfall Trump s mass deportation force set to receive military-level funding John Sandweg who served as the acting director of ICE from to described Salon that he s concerned that the current conduct of the agency under Trump could also attract candidates for the wrong reasons ICE as part of Trump s mass deportation scheme has been accused of using racial profiling and targeting even Puerto Ricans and Native Americans who are U S citizens Various raids have also been criticized as intimidation tactics and specific have also become violent like in California earlier this month when masked federal agents brandishing firearms and deploying chemical irritants and flash bang grenades clashed with protesters I do worry that in this kind of supercharged conditions we re in there are going to be several people who want to get into this for the wrong reasons and that s not because they re trying to make the country safer but maybe specific bias and hatred towards immigrants generally Sandweg disclosed That s the concern that and lowering the bar in terms of picking people who would otherwise normally be disqualified and bringing them on board Sandweg declared that in his experience at the agency ICE agents are by and large a very high-quality group and that the bulk of the people signed up to make the country safer Sandweg stated that the only real historical analog for the Department of Homeland Shield is towards the end of the Bush administration when an influx of funding for the Perimeter Patrol resulted in a rush to spend the money That s a really good parallel Sandweg commented The Trump administration now has funding to double the size of ICE and unquestionably they re going to want to deploy those assets as hastily as humanly feasible I would expect them to put ICE under tremendous pressure to deploy these agents and officers expeditiously Sandweg estimated that under normal circumstances it would take the agency around three-and-a-half years to train and deploy this a multitude of agents This would include finding applicants and putting them through a basic -week training program in the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers as well as field training The expansion would also require capital investments in field offices increasing their size and expanding aid staff in departments like human tools ICE could speed this process up according to Sandweg through the use of private contractors in certain of the hiring process which has already been commonplace in processes like background checks for decades and by lowering the standards for new agents ICE hasn t yet reported it will lower standards though it has happened at other agencies in the Department of Homeland Assurance like when Customs and Limit Protection eliminated the -flight-hour requirement for pilots in and one of their physical fitness tests the same year Jason Houser who served as the chief of staff of ICE under former President Barack Obama disclosed that he shared multiple of Sandweg s concerns in terms of the practical hurdles and the feasible for lower standards whether it be in recruitment or training for new ICE agents Houser also raised a different issue facing the administration which is that there s no way ICE could expand its workforce to achieve the millions of deportations that Trump is promising in the next three-and-a-half years at least through conventional hiring Typically ICE can train between and officers a year according to Houser Normally Houser explained the bigger concern for recruitment is not in finding candidates interested in the job but in literally getting a candidate through a background check and training or what he called securing a candidate With any job in federal law enforcement to to of candidates they re ill-equipped for the job They have a violent past a domestic assault charge you know convictions They have extremist views left or right that they ve exposed online You know these are the candidates that need to be whittled out Houser mentioned We need your help to stay independent Subscribe in current times to encouragement Salon s progressive journalism Houser recounted Salon however that he expects the Trump administration might lean on private contractors for more than just recruitment What I believe they re going to do is in the near term I think they re going to look to Blackwater-type companies contract firms to bring on staff that have law enforcement credentials to augment deportation officers Houser reported Houser went on to explain that there are a sparse different permutations of deputization the administration could pursue including deputizing National Guard troops or local law enforcement before they start using private contractors Jenn Budd a former Dividing line Patrol agent and activist notified Salon that as a senior patrol agent and a critic of the agency she s observed a connection between low hiring standards and criminality and abuse among officers A analysis corroborated this observation through a review of internal agency documents which located that Margin Patrol agents were about five times as likely to be arrested as state and local law enforcement The same year ProPublica uncovered a Facebook group where thousands of then-current and former Frontier Patrol agents joked about the death of immigrants and other abuses In terms of trends CBP evidence disclosed by Quartz shows that criminal arrests among CBP officers and Confines Patrol reached a five-year high in Budd noted that the hiring spree combined with the current behavior of immigration officers across the Department of Homeland Protection stands to attract candidates completely looking to have power over others Budd also pointed to individuals like Dana Thornhill a former Limit Patrol agent who was convicted of sexually abusing minors as the sort of person that stringent hiring standards and oversight would theoretically keep out Start your day with essential news from Salon Sign up for our free morning newsletter Crash Program Mario Russell executive director at the Center for Migration Studies of New York situated the current expansion of ICE as part of a decades-long ballooning of the detention and deportation apparatus in the United States All of the advancement coming as Russell notes detention and deportation being shown to be ineffective at the administration s ostensible goal of reducing crime Fewer than people were held in the immigration detention system in the s per day but now people are being detained by ICE nationally as of the latest material from June Russell commented identifying the post- creation of DHS and ICE as a key moment in this process None of these expansion initiatives have proven effective in the long run or useful in the short run apart from separating families and causing essential individual suffering Russell argued citing academic research showing immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than American citizens And contemporary demographic research has exposed that crime rates drop when immigration increases the share of immigrants in the country s population doubled between and and in that same time period the national crime rate dropped by percent In Houser s assessment the current goal of the administration is not to determine whether an individual is a populace safety danger and remove them but to sweep up as a multitude of immigrants as manageable In the immigration system from someone leaving their home in Venezuela and coming to this country seeking a pathway ICE s job on the deportation and ERO side is to determine inhabitants safety national measure risks and if someone has a final order of removal and can be humanely removed to humanely remove them That s what we hope they do Houser mentioned People that don t have that training that don t have the respect for law enforcement that have never carried a weapon for this country like Stephen Miller are putting quotas arrest quotas on ICE officers The long and short of it according to Houser is that ICE won t be able to meet the detention and deportation goals of the current administration without serious changes to the way ICE officers are recruited and how the agency is staffed Wearing a badge comes with a great deal of trust and you know responsibility and particular people aren t equipped to have that and that s what those screening processes are for Houser commented Doing away with that you re going to have an influx of bad actors ICE did not respond to a request for comment from Salon Read more about the politics of immigration Immigrants describe disgusting conditions at Miami ICE facilities Meet the young Republicans who want to deport Zohran Mamdani Pressure grows to unmask ICE The post ICE is about to go on a hiring spree appeared first on Salon com