Caitlin Dickerson

So we had about 7,000 ICE agents toward the end of the Biden administration.

And the Trump administration says that they've hired 12,000 people since then.

Some percentage are people who'd retired from immigration enforcement before, so they have some experience.

But we're talking about a lot of new faces now.

They're trying to hire as many former law enforcement agents as they can just to bring people in with some familiarity with how to do this type of work.

But there are lots of people, it seems, within this new workforce who have absolutely no experience and who are learning how to enforce the law, how to carry a weapon, how to interact with the public, just starting from square one right now.

So it varies.

Some of the messaging says that the Department of Homeland Security is looking to hire patriots, looking to hire people who want to defend and protect the country.

But we're also seeing a lot of explicit references to white nationalist ideas and the kind of dog whistles that we've all become used to.

When Trump is president, so they've used slogans, they've referenced songs, they've used images, they speak to manifest destiny and this idea that the United States was the land intended for white people.

Language that I think to people who are unfamiliar with these phrases, it just seems kind of weird.

It seems kind of old fashioned, strange and odd.

But the fact is that if you're a member of the Proud Boys or you're a follower of QAnon, you recognize these exact phrases that are being used as a kind of call to action and to apply for a job as an ICE agent.

I make of that that Miller's trying to communicate to ICE and to these new members of ICE in particular that they will not face consequences for use of force specifically.

I think he's speaking to the ICE officer who shot Renee Good in Minnesota last week and killed her, but also to officers who've used tear gas, who've pushed and shoved and arrested protesters, who've claimed that people who are filming them are...

impeding arrests and using that as a pretense to either take those people into custody or have some sort of violent altercation with them.

It's very striking.

I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that, you know, you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a

potentially violent and a dangerous one, usually the concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun because they worried about potential repercussions.

And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting.