ICE’s Vetting Standards Are So Low It Can’t Even Be Bothered To Verify The Identities Of New Hires

from the get-you-a-gun-and-a-glove-no-experience-necessary dept

A whistleblower report delivered to the DHS Office of the Inspector General makes it clear ICE is willing to hire pretty much anyone who applies for the job. Keeping up appearances (and by “appearances,” I mean constantly pushing for 1,500-3,000 arrests per day) is tough when you don’t have the warm bodies to do all the kidnapping, so ICE has been on a hiring spree pretty much since day one of Trump’s second term in office.

Not only has ICE lowered its hiring standards, but it’s offering $50,000 signing bonuses to whoever can somehow survive its comfy chair of an on-boarding gauntlet. Consequently, ICE has not only been cannibalizing multiple local law enforcement agencies, but it’s handing out free money to exactly the sort of people you’d expect to respond to an ICE “Help Wanted” ad.

In other words, its people who think actor Dean Cain’s PSA for ICE jobs is just the sort of thing that puts lead in the pencils. Lots of other rejects have signed up as well: people who have already retired from law enforcement (because age no longer matters), as well as several others who definitely are attracted to the 99% power/1% accountability split of cop work, but probably aren’t capable of surviving even the minimal vetting that goes on at local cop shops.

Then there are the people who just want to hurt migrants, even if they’re way more likely to injure themselves while performing literally any physical effort. Finally, there are the disgraced cops who now have an employment option that fully embraces their bigotry.

And yet somehow some ICE applicants have failed to surpass the most minimal requirements any federal law enforcement agency offers (the FBI’s recent embrace of bestiality notwithstanding), which means ICE still needs more officers. And that means the standards that have been lowered several times already continue to drop.

In the wake of a hiring surge last summer, an official in charge of evaluating new recruits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a dire warning.

[…]

Citing an “unprecedented lowering of standards,” the career ICE official said that “systemic breakdowns” had allowed applicants to receive job offers before they had passed basic fingerprint, identity or credit checks in a preliminary vetting process.

For an administration that clearly desires a “papers please” standard to be applied across the United States and directs the actions of the agency now expected to handle most of this “papers please” work, it’s almost hilarious to discover ICE applicants are getting job offers before their identities have been verified. That means it might be easier for an undocumented migrant to secure a job at ICE than one at the local food jobber.

This is happening while Trump and his MAGA cohorts are demanding everyone produce proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote. Meanwhile, ICE doesn’t even know if the person it’s trying to hire is actually the person the applicant says they are.

This isn’t just some rando speaking off the record. The New York Times has secured a copy of the whistleblower report submitted to the DHS Inspector General and spoken to the whistleblower directly:

The whistle-blower, a 17-year ICE veteran who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his claims, said the agency had cut corners in its rush to fill the ranks.

“We chose as an agency to be more convenient rather than thorough,” he said, describing the agency’s decision to reduce scrutiny of recruits in order to expedite hires. “By doing so, there was a potential to put lives at risk and to jeopardize national security.”

When you lower your hiring standards and skip steps to expedite on-boarding, it always makes things worse. Sure, a lot of this happened all over as pretty much any place that employed anyone tried to bounce back from the COVID pandemic. But it’s one thing to throw money at under-qualified candidates when all you’re trying to do is fill fast food orders. It’s quite another to discard these standards when civil rights, national security, and actual human lives are on the line.

A process that fully verified an applicant’s identity was discarded because it apparently took too long. ICE officials decided waiting 7 to 10 days to perform a background check was no longer tenable. By stripping out all of the difficult bits, the vetting process apparently became almost instant, with those doing the vetting told to make “judgment calls” on applicants despite having almost no verifiable information on hand.

The preliminary vetting process, which took seven to 10 days, was upended last summer. The vetters were told to make determinations on recruits without having the full security form, fingerprints or any polygraph testing, according to the former unit chief and a former federal official familiar with the process who was granted anonymity to speak freely about it.

That meant new hires were heading to training without having their identities, criminal histories and other basic information checked and verified, the unit chief said.

Note the “last summer” mentioned in the first paragraph. This isn’t a recent development. While it’s been known for awhile that ICE was lowering its standards (and cutting an entire month out of its 10-week training program), the impression delivered by the administration and ICE officials was that standards were slowly lowered over several months beginning sometime last fall. The reality is far, far worse: the decision to bring ICE recruits on board before fully vetting them actually began almost immediately — only a few months into Trump’s second term.

These are the people who have been violating rights regularly, up to and including beatings and killings, for months now. And these are the people who will soon be randomly stun-gloving US citizens and residents at their discretion, thanks to ICE’s contract with Compliant Technologies. All the while, ICE officials will continue to claim these officers have been fully trained to use the weapons they’re armed with as well as advised on the general contours of the Constitution.

But none of that is true because it cannot possibly be true. ICE doesn’t even really know if some of the people working for it are actually the people they claimed to be. And since it can’t even be bothered to perform that essential task, there’s no reason to believe they’ve received the minimum training to do their jobs competently, much less handle all the weaponry they’ve been inordinately blessed with.

Filed Under: dhs, ice, lowering standards, markwayne mullin, mass deportation, trump administration