Caitlin Dickerson

learn the law and to apply the law with a certain degree of professionalism to kind of give ICE more legitimacy as a serious federal law enforcement agency.

My best impression of the situation is that whereas before there was very thorough training to explain what are people's civil rights, what is immigration law, what are your authorities and what are not your authorities as a deportation officer.

Now,

Training is dramatically truncated, and basically the message has come down to do what you got to do to bring people into custody.

So what I'm hearing from these former officials is that the propaganda and the videos are taking away from that impression, really making the public quite skeptical of them.

And they feel the same way about the fact that officers now are routinely wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves.

All of it sort of takes away from how seriously they're viewed as a law enforcement agency.

That's right.

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.