The ICE hiring boom
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Planet Money from NPR.
In the last year, the Department of Homeland Security says 12,000 new agents and officers have joined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This was an unprecedented hiring boom that more than doubled ICE's ranks.
The agency was aggressive in its recruitment efforts. It waived age requirements and offered signing bonuses of up to $50,000.
What recent changes have occurred in ICE hiring practices?
The Department of Homeland Security says it's deploying agents to remove the, quote, worst of the worst from the U.S.
This large ramp-up has turned ICE into arguably one of the fastest-growing and most scrutinized workplaces in the country right now. That's because its performance is highly visible and at times questionable. The majority of immigrants caught up in this crackdown have no criminal convictions. Many have legal status and even U.S. citizens have been taken into custody.
Recent surveys show an increasing number of Americans saying the immigration crackdown has gone too far. Some politicians and community leaders are even calling for ICE to be dismantled. Others say they need better training or a culture shift or both. Are those changes needed and would they even make a difference? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong, normally a co-host of Planet Money's daily podcast, The Indicator.
And I'm Darian Woods.
Today on the show, the ICE hiring boom is having domino effects. How has training new officers changed and at what cost? Also, the Trump administration has plans to pour billions of dollars into warehouses for mass immigrant detention centers, which can totally change the economy of some areas. We hear from a rural town in Georgia that wants an ICE facility in its own backyard.
The Trump administration's massive tax and spending law gave $750 million to something called the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. These are the facilities that train recruits for ICE, U.S. Border Patrol, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Mark Brown taught at the main campus near Brunswick, Georgia, for five years.
I enjoy training. I like when the light bulb goes off, so to speak.
The Georgia facility is so big that it has its own zip code. There are dorms, classrooms, and shooting ranges. There's even a mini replica of a city spread out over more than 35 acres.
It has storefronts, shops, federal buildings. And then you have like neighborhoods behind it where you have houses, you have duplexes, trailers, apartment style buildings. Because when we would teach crowd control, we would go over there. We would use that city to show them, okay, this is how you're going to line up on the streets.
So Mark would get the trainees lined up on the street of this fake city. And he would tell them, this is what you do if you're trying to arrest someone and a crowd starts to form. Or maybe there are protesters.
If they're protesting on the sidewalk, they have the right to protest your presence. So that's not something for you to engage in. And then as soon as your person is handcuffed, let's get them up and get them out of there. Like, we don't need to stick around. We don't talk to the crowd. We're not actively going back and forth. We're not here to debate their points. They're allowed to protest our presence. That's fine. Our biggest thing is keeping everybody safe.
Mark says he's not seeing those protocols in some of the videos of federal agents that are circulating. And that makes him wonder about the training that the newly recruited ISOR CBP agents are getting or not getting.
So how much instruction do new ICE recruits get? Well, there's been a lot of contradictory information on this, including from the government.
Different officials within the DHS have said that the training for immigration agents has been shortened. At the same time, the agency says media outlets are spreading lies about ICE training.
We reached out to DHS for clarification. Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told us that officers are getting the same number of training hours.
Here's what we were able to figure out based on the numbers we got from DHS.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:28
2
What recent changes have occurred in ICE hiring practices?
0:28–7:03
3
How has the Trump administration's policy impacted immigrant detention?
7:03–9:46
4
What is the significance of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers?
9:46–17:49