ICE has lowered standards to facilitate a massive hiring spree. Many of the new recruits are plainly unqualified. Are some also white supremacists or domestic terrorists?
An ICE recruitment poster displayed in Arlington, Texas, amid a major recruitment event in that city.
(Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)
The Department of Homeland Security recently boasted that it has hired more than 12,000 ICE officers and agents in just four months—a feat that merely required lowering standards, fast-tracking barely vetted recruits, and turning availability into the primary eligibility requirement. That’s an exaggeration, but hardly. More than doubling ICE’s ranks has meant cutting training from 13 weeks to six, raising the maximum age cap from 40 to none at all, scrapping the college degree requirement, and adding a $50,000 signing bonus. Now pretty much anyone can become an ICE agent. And that’s not just because of those lax standards, but also because DHS is apparently doing a piss-poor job of ensuring even those are met.
A Slate journalist, for example, was offered an officer position despite their never submitting paperwork, taking the fitness test, passing drug screening, or undergoing a background check. Last week, it was revealed that ICE’s résumé-sorting AI tool mistakenly flagged many applicants as former law enforcement, accidentally putting them on an even shorter four-week, online-only training track. The ICE agent filmed fatally shooting Alex Pretti in the head, execution style, has been identified by the AP as an eight-year veteran with the Border Patrol. Renee Good was fatally, needlessly killed by an ICE agent who had been on the job for more than a decade, working in the Border Patrol prior to that. If seasoned ICE officers are killing civilians in the streets, DHS’s negligence in screening new hires should make us all concerned about whom the agency is allowing to be emboldened by impunity.
“Clearly, there’s a problem of compliance with use-of-force policies, even among people who are not Trump hires, who were hired under previous, more stringent standards in a more rigorous training academy,” Scott Shuchart, a senior policy adviser at ICE during the Biden administration, told me. “When you relax all that, it’s hard to see how you could expect a higher level of performance from new recruits.”
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Those ringing alarm bells over who is becoming ICE agents include Representative Jamie Raskin, who sent a letter this month to both Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, demanding access to ICE hiring records and asking, “How many pardoned January 6th insurrectionists have been hired by your respective departments?” (The letter notes that pardoned J6er Jared Wise has been given a high-ranking job in Bondi’s Department of Justice.) That followed a letter sent to DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari in July, which was signed by a dozen US House Democrats, which asked if ICE’s newest hires have been “cross-checked against lists of domestic terror organizations, such as the Proud Boys?” If the US currently had a functioning public accountability structure, we might get answers to those queries. As of now, those letters have been met by a silence that grows louder as ICE is deployed to more communities.
“Any concern that you have about the existing workforce, I would think would be higher when you’ve relaxed hiring standards,” Shuchart told me. “You’ve created an opportunity for infiltration by insurrectionists.”
Insurrectionists and other rightwing extremists, such as Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters—all of whom were seemingly, frighteningly everywhere during Donald Trump’s first term, back when there were still guardrails that kept the president from assembling his own paramilitary force.
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A number of recent incidents suggest concerns about extremists within ICE are valid. In December, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report citing an American citizen, wrongly detained by ICE, who told investigators he had “noticed several of the agents 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 vetting have been “discovered to have tattoos associated with gangs and white supremacists when they stripped off their shirts during workouts,” according to a Daily Mail report. An alleged whistleblower’s leak of the names of 4,500 ICE agents and Border Patrol officers this month included Enrique Tarrio, the onetime head of the Proud Boys. He has denied the allegation.
And there are other worrisome things. An investigation by the SPLC’s Hatewatch found that Trump “Border Czar” Tom Homan met with Proud Boys affiliate and self-described “Proud J6 Attendee” Terry Newsome multiple times throughout 2024, both before and in the months just after Trump’s election win. On at least one occasion, discussion centered on immigration policy and deportations, with Newsome, who is based in Chicago, brag-posting on social media that Homan had directed Illinois “politicians to follow up with me as his PoC,” or “point of contact.”
There’s also the fact that ICE recruitment efforts appear openly calibrated to catch the attention of white nationalists and other right-wing extremists. “DHS seems to be courting pardoned January 6th insurrectionists,” Raskin’s aforementioned missive notes. “It uses white nationalist ‘dog whistles’ in its recruitment campaign for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that appear aimed at stirring members of extremist militias, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters, which participated in the insurrection.” The agency’s white supremacist overtures include a tweeted poster of Uncle Sam beneath the caption “Which Way, American Man?,” a direct reference to the 1978 book Which Way Western Man?, which is standard reading for neo-Nazis and other racists. DHS has also reposted artwork created and circulated by well-known white nationalist accounts, including a poster advising Americans to “Report All Foreign Invaders.” Just two days after the killing of Renee Good, DHS posted a recruitment ad with the message, “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” the title of a song beloved by “blood and soil” racist types. Sacramento Proud Boys were even documented singing the song at a 2021 Stop the Steal rally.
“The white supremacist, sort of fake Norman Rockwell ethnic nationalism stuff is absolutely repulsive. It’s as un-American as you can imagine, and it has no business being a part of any official government communication,” Shuchart told me. “I don’t know how we ever live this down.”
In any case, the mutual appreciation between racists and the DHS seems to have recently prompted a prankster to buy the URL Nazis.us only to link it to the DHS homepage.
The Big Beautiful Bill infused ICE with nearly $30 billion for a single year, three times its prior budget. That same legislation allotted $170 billion—“more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States,” the Brennan Center notes—to immigration and deportations for the next four years. Despite the glut of cases Trump’s crackdown will remand to America’s immigration courts, the bill restricts the number of immigration judges to just 800. That is an indication of the importance, or lack thereof, being placed on ensuring due process. I won’t drive the point even further by noting that a Texas Observer investigation outed James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor, as the author of social media posts stating, “‘Migrants’ are all criminals,” “All blacks are foreign to my people,” and “I’m a fascist.” Yes, he’s still on the job!
Nor does that money seem earmarked to ensure ICE agent competence. Since prescreening results have been delayed, some recruits have been shuttled to the academy, only to fail their drug tests, only to fail drug tests or have criminal records uncovered after they arrive. The campus itself has also seen an increase in “incidents of violence, disruptive behavior, and allegations of sexual misconduct on campus, most handled internally.”
It would be unsurprising if the perception that the agency’s ethos is now dominated by xenophobic ideologues did some of the screening work. “What self-respecting person who wants a meaningful career in law enforcement would go to work at the ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations] right now, knowing the way ERO comports itself?” Shuchart said to Slate in July, right after the agency announced its hiring spree.
“We do have some new recruits that are fantastic, but we’re now bringing people in who shouldn’t be hired at all into any federal government job, definitely not one that has a badge and a gun,” one official groused to the Mail, adding that “even these older folks that we’re hiring, they’re not people who need to be out on the street with a badge and a gun anymore.”
There is a precedent for this. Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, standards for the Border Patrol were similarly lowered during a hiring push, and an increase in officer corruption and violence followed. Politico reports that “between 2005 and 2012, nearly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day.” Agents ultimately faced charges of sexual assault—against both detained civilians and fellow agents—accepting bribes, kidnapping, and even murder. Some officers were later revealed to be actively involved in drug cartels. And while some of those officers were also tied to racist Facebook groups, it would be disingenuous to treat that connection as an aberration caused by lax hiring standards. The ties that bind law enforcement and white supremacist movements in this country are not new, and exist even when agencies claim to be operating under the most rigorous vetting standards. In November 2022, I wrote about an ADL study that had turned up “370 current police officers and more than 100 active-duty military members on the Oath Keepers’ leaked membership rolls.” Among just the J6ers who were caught and prosecuted, at least 19 were current or former police. And the FBI has warned about racists in its ranks since it put out its “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement” in 2006.
Proud Boys have already spent years engaging in the same violence ICE now carries out as policy. “For all the illegals trying to jump over our border,” a Portland Proud Boy proclaimed at a 2018 rally, “we should be smashing their heads into the concrete.” After Trump’s election win, extremists were chomping at the bit to be part of Trump’s anticipated immigration round ups. One of the leaders in the Texas chapter of the Three Percenters militia group sent Trump a letter “to extend my willingness to assist, in cooperation with local law enforcement and community programs,” per The New York Times. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism rounded up the outpouring of anti-immigration, pro-ICE enthusiasm pouring from Proud Boys around the country:
Proud Boys PDX [Portland] are fantasizing about being “deputized as ICE under Trump’s second term” to aid in Trump’s mass deportation plan. Similarly, Proud Boys Upstate New York expressed glee at a rumor spreading around Proud Boys pages that “ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” claiming that they have a “network set up” ready to send information. The Northern Nevada Proud Boys shared an image encouraging their followers to “report illegal aliens” to ICE along with a picture of a swastika rising like a sun over a landscape, captioned “A new day is about to dawn in America… it’s going to be glorious.” The Cape Fear Proud Boys made a post, also shared by the Columbus Proud Boys, offering to take on “independent contracts” to carry out “bount[ies] on illegals.”
After the $50,000 bonus was announced ahead DHS’s hiring spree, The Atlantic’s Ali Breland reported that an Ohio Proud Boys chapter posted, “Toledo Boys living high on the hog right now!!”
When, at a 2020 presidential debate, Trump was challenged to condemn militias and white supremacists, and he stated, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” members of the group correctly understood the message not as a rebuke—but as the winking dog whistle that was clearly intended. Even then, he was treating them as his own personal police force. “Trump basically said go fuck them up!” Proud Boy Joe Biggs wrote on Parler shortly after, “this makes me so happy.” “Standing by sir,” Proud Boys then-chairman Enrique Tarrio responded on social media.
That readiness was rewarded. On his first day back in office, Trump issued a mass pardon of all 1,500 J6 insurrectionists, including “roughly 100 known members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other extremist organizations,” according to Breland. As well, there were commutations of sentences for 14 people in jail, all of whom were affiliated with right-wing extremist groups, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was serving 18 years, and Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years.
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At the time, Heidi Beirich, formerly of the SPLC and now cofounder of the the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told The Independent that Trump had “brought back two organizations that have extremely long track records of violence” and worried that he had “emboldened those movements, made them more powerful, and given them the sanction of the highest office.” She was exactly right, except that at the time, it was impossible to imagine how fully true that could become—that there might come a time when those groups would not need to operate in the streets anymore, because they would be offered cover in what is essentially Trump’s secret police, where they can be armed, masked, empowered to detain, brutalize, and kill with near total impunity.
Trump deploys them in the classic authoritarian manner, which is to flex power, quell dissent, and normalize fear. “It does this not only through feats of violence, false imprisonment, and kidnapping but also by repeatedly showing us it can’t be held accountable for its actions,” as Elie Mystal wrote in this magazine earlier this month. “They know it, and they want us to know it.” And the administration seems to want us to know it as well, considering that it seems to be changing the definition of what qualifies as an extremist organization in order to specifically eliminate those loyalists who perpetrate violence in Trump’s name. When asked, during a December congressional hearing, if the FBI still designates the Proud Boys as an extremist group, as it had during Trump’s first term, FBI official Michael Glasheen waffled on the answer. Glasheen, who, with more than 25 years at a bureau is far from a newbie, first seemed to suggest he wasn’t very familiar with the Proud Boys beyond the name, then uttered that the agency is “in the process right now of changing our categories for domestic terrorist,” before ultimately testifying, under oath, that the FBI “doesn’t designate domestic terror groups.”
But Noem had no hesitation over the term in the case of Good’s killing. “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism,” she stated, hours after the killing, and despite what the video shows. Shuchart noted that in addition to the “weird social media stuff” he was stunned by the “ridiculous bald-faced lying” DHS leadership is doing.
“Kristi Noem ultimately is in the chain of command for this organization, as is the president. And to have them immediately, ludicrously lie about something that—coincidentally is now on four or five different videos—is just corrosive to the entire idea of accountability and even civilization,” he told me. “Whatever your accountability system is, you have to reckon with the fact that the people who sit at the apex of DHS are—even setting aside that they’re felons—they’re just comically preposterous liars.”
It seems as if the folks at DHS, to borrow a phrase, are not sending us their best. A ProPublica investigation found that a 10th-grade boy was choked by an ICE agent until he “felt like [he] was going to pass out and die,” before one of the officers stole the boys cellphone and hocked it. In another Minnesota case, an observer described ICE agents spraying pepper gas into the vents of her car, then warning her, “You guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” referring to Renee Good.
There have been 16 incidents in which ICE agents have opened fire on civilians, according to the Trace; nine of those shootings have happened just since September, The New York Times reports. In another 15 cases, ICE agents held people at gunpoint, civilians were injured in seven instances, and ICE officers have killed four people in the field. This is why who’s behind those masks matters.
It’s why handing guns to trigger-happy thugs steeped in Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and militia culture and mindset—the same nationalist, white supremacist, xenophobic mindset that unfortunately drives this entire administration—and letting them shoot first and explain later ends with death. We should know who they are, what they believe, and what violence they already consider justified.
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