The repercussions of the sprawling bill President Donald Trump signed into law last week will be felt for decades. Of immediate concern to many critics is approximately $170 billion the law gives to the Department of Homeland Security, including almost $30 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose agents have been at the forefront of Trump’s aggressive mass deportation efforts.
While the original House version of the bill set a specific hiring target for ICE of at least 10,000 new agents, the final version signed into law simply gives ICE tens of billions of dollars for everything from an unspecified number of new officers to transporting deportees to IT upgrades. The White House is still saying it plans to hire 10,000 new officers, however, which would more than double the number of enforcement agents, and the “Big Beautiful Bill” gives him a lot of money to do so. But that may be harder than it looks.
In some ways ICE’s standards are already lower than other institutions, yet it still struggles to fill openings.
To begin with, ICE has historically struggled to fill open positions. When ICE tried to hire 10,000 more officers during the first Trump administration, a 2017 report by DHS’ inspector general found that a net increase of that size would require interviewing half a million people. The lift was even bigger for Customs and Border Protection, which would have needed to interview 750,000 to net just 5,000, or half as many.
Eight years later, it will most likely be even harder for ICE or other agencies to find new recruits. Since 2020, police departments at every level have struggled to recruit and retain officers; in fact, all public-sector agencies are finding it hard to hire people. And despite the surge in funding provided by the GOP megabill, the pay for ICE will most likely be fairly noncompetitive. The maximum base pay for federal law enforcement is $75,000 before regional cost-of-living adjustments. A current job posting for an “enforcement and removal operations” position posits a salary range of roughly $50,000 to $90,000. For comparison, the New York Police Department offers rookies a starting salary of just over $60,000, rising to over $125,000 in less than six years — and the department still can’t fill about 1,000 open positions.
Note, too, that ongoing protests against ICE are likely to make these logistical issues even bigger. People take jobs for both money and status. ICE already underpays compared with many (but not all) police departments; protests will serve only to further weaken the status of the job. Moreover, local police officers, unlike ICE agents, get to stay close to their homes and families and work for institutions that appear to be viewed more favorably than ICE. And these local departments still struggle to fill open positions.
ICE, of course, has several ways to address this logistical challenge — but all face logistical challenges of their own.
Perhaps the likeliest response to hiring problems will be for ICE to use the money to try to expand its 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws. Such a move would not expand ICE’s actual headcount but simply reallocate how already-hired local police spend their time. That could alleviate ICE’s short-run logistical challenge, but it is also the option most vulnerable to local resistance. 287(g) laws require local governments to sign on, which means opponents can thwart them by targeting local leaders, not national ones. While it is true that about 300 local agencies have recently signed agreements, that is a small fraction of the of 17,000 nationwide. And many states and localities already have either banned such agreements or limited the sorts of cooperation that’s possible, with more joining in.
The next most obvious move for ICE would be to lower hiring standards. This is obviously concerning, since that means the new hirees would be less competent and potentially more dangerous (think about who would be drawn to work for ICE right now, given its public profile). As CBP discovered after a similar hiring spree in the mid-2000s, this approach increases the risk of corruption and of hiring people looking to undermine an agency from within, including on behalf of drug cartels.
Note, also, that in some ways ICE’s standards are already lower than those of other institutions, yet it still struggles to fill openings. For example, ICE is exempted from a 2010 law mandating that CBP applicants pass polygraph tests — a law prompted by the problems caused by the previously mentioned hiring spree). It’s also not clear that current ICE officers would want to work alongside low-level recruits; the CBP union, for example, complained about the dangers of lowering hiring standards back in 2010.
Moreover, lowered standards are politically risky. People already don’t like ICE, and lower-quality recruits would raise the risk of violent overreactions that could hurt the agency’s reputation even more. Local police departments are already complaining, publicly, that ICE tactics are making their jobs harder.
It is also possible that ICE could turn to contractors to fill the gap. This would, unlike 287(g) programs, expand actual headcount — but only temporarily. Moreover, contractors appear to often cost perhaps as much as twice as much as federal direct hires, although the amount of money authorized by the bill makes this a less pressing issue. Relying on contractors would also introduce a real risk of overcharging, which would burn through ICE’s budget more quickly, and if contractors get paid more than ICE agents, expanding contracting would make it even harder to hire and retain permanent ICE agents.
A final concern is that perhaps ICE will try to recruit Proud Boys and other right-wing extremists. But that just raises the question of why these people haven’t already joined. ICE isn’t offering more, or at least much more, than it has over the years they’ve chosen not to join. One likely reason for this hesitancy is that many of them have safer, better-paying jobs. A quarter of convicted Jan. 6ers, for example, were business owners, and only about 5% were unemployed. It’s likely that many of these people would prefer to continue cheering ICE on from the sidelines.
The “big, beautiful bill” is obviously a boon to ICE. But the agency faces serious logistical challenges. Those challenges and the possible workarounds will both pose difficulties for those who favor the agency’s expansion and create opportunities for resistance by those who oppose it.
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