Perhaps the least popular government organization in America over the past couple of years is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), largely because it is responsible for removing illegal immigrants from our country. That’s part of why the Senate has not confirmed a director for the agency since the Obama administration, and President Donald Trump’s most recent attempt to fix it failed. While uprooting the long-standing problem of illegal immigration within our borders is a necessary job, it is, in most cases, a very difficult and messy one, and the Leftmedia is all too happy to push negative messaging.
Two main factors have amplified the outrage against ICE. The first is that many blue states have refused to allow the local police force to cooperate with ICE officers. These states generally have the most illegal aliens. Leftists also tend to portray ICE not as keepers of the law, but as masked vigilantes with similar optics to a street gang or a drug cartel.
The second is the main focus of this piece: the massive influx of new hires over the second half of 2025. This followed President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which offered a $50,000 signing bonus to anyone hired as an ICE officer or agent around that time. As a result, ICE hired more than 12,000 people in roughly four months. The hiring surge doubled ICE’s employee count.
Generally, adding 12,000 when you had only employed around 10,000 previously would be unwise. However, given the goal that the White House set was to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in only the span of a few years, it was necessary. The real problem lay in the training.
ICE’s academy once lasted 16 weeks, but that was cut to eight and eventually to six, by far the shortest training time of any law enforcement or government defense organization in the nation. Many graduates reportedly went out on duty immediately, with only the most basic training and no field experience.
Furthermore, applicants with any prior law enforcement experience, even if it didn’t involve immigration enforcement, could take a short online course and bypass the academy altogether. Reportedly, this virtual academy took just a few hours, and the subsequent testing took only a couple of days. Meaning an off-duty cop who spent a career behind a desk could become a full-fledged ICE officer in about a week.
While they did need numbers for the crackdown on immigration, sending out hundreds of people with little to no training is not only unwise but also risky.
On top of that, many recruits weren’t even background-checked. So ICE was hiring people about whom they had insufficient information to do jobs that mainly consisted of finding and arresting people in the country, which, by nature, is a physically confrontational job.
And the Left was already smearing ICE because illegal immigrants are leftists’ idea of the working class.
Why did ICE think it was a good idea not to do due diligence and, for example, give a bipolar man with a history of beating women a job that requires composure under pressure? He notably ended up killing someone — without his body cam on, so it became another major scandal for ICE.
After much backlash, ICE has finally started to get its act together. Basic training is now up to roughly 10 weeks, and it has started firing recruits with poor background-check histories.
Arresting and deporting the millions of illegal aliens within the U.S. was never going to be an easy job. Amongst a certain group of people, it was never going to be popular. It is a necessary task, and for the most part, that task is being completed.
It may come at a long-term cost. ICE should have left as little room for public scandal as possible, but instead deployed insufficiently trained people. While the incidents are few compared with all the arrests performed cleanly, every single one was avoidable. ICE has always known it was under a microscope, but here’s hoping reform efforts aren’t too little, too late.
