In the push to expand as quickly as possible, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is aggressively wooing recruits with experience slapping handcuffs on suspects: sheriff’s deputies, state troopers and local cops.
The agency even shelled out for airtime during an NFL game with an ad explicitly targeting officers.
“In sanctuary cities, dangerous illegals walk free as police are forced to stand down,” the August recruitment ad warned over a sunset panorama of the Los Angeles skyline. “Join ICE and help us catch the worst of the worst.”
To meet its hiring goal, the Trump administration is offering hefty signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness and six-figure salaries to would-be deportation officers.
ICE has also broadened its pool of potential applicants by dropping age requirements, eliminating Spanish-language proficiency requirements and cutting back on training for new hires with law enforcement experience.
Along the way, the agency has walked a delicate line, seeking to maintain cordial relations with local department leaders while also trying to poach their officers.
“We’re not trying to pillage a bunch of officers from other agencies,” said Tim Oberle, an ICE spokesman. “If you see opportunities to move up, make more money to take care of your family, of course you’re going to want it.”
But despite the generous new compensation packages, experts said ICE is still coming up short in some of the places it needs agents the most.
“The pay in California is incredible,” said Jason Litchney of All-Star Talent, a recruiting firm. “Some of these Bay Area agencies are $200,000 a year without overtime.”
Even entry level base pay for a Los Angeles Police Department officer is more than $90,000 year. In San Francisco, it’s close to $120,000. While ICE pays far more in California than in most other states, cash alone is less likely to induce many local cops to swap their dress blues for fatigues and a neck gaiter.
“If you were a state police officer who’s harbored a desire to become a federal agent, I don’t know if you want to join ICE at this time,” said John Sandweg, who headed ICE under President Obama.
Police agencies nationwide have struggled for years to recruit and retain qualified officers. The LAPD has only graduated an average of 31 recruits in its past 10 academy classes, about half the number needed to keep pace with the city’s plan to grow the force to 9,500 officers.
“That is a tremendous issue for us,” said Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, a professional advocacy organization.
ICE, too, has long failed to meet its staffing targets. As of a year ago, the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations — it’s dedicated deportation force — had 6,050 officers, barely more than in 2021.
As of Sep. 16, the Department of Homeland Security said it has sent out more than 18,000 tentative job offers after a summer recruitment campaign that drew more than 150,000 applications.
It did not specify how many applicants were working cops.
At an ICE career expo in Texas last month, the agency at times turned away anyone who didn’t already have authorization to carry a badge or an honorable discharge from the military.
“We have so many people who are current police officers who are trying to get on the job right now and that’s who we’ve been prioritizing,” one ICE official at the event said.
But the spirited pursuit of rank-and-file officers has sparked anger and resentment among top cops around the country.
“Agencies are short-staffed,” said David J. Bier, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute. “They are complaining constantly about recruitment and retention and looking every which way to maintain their workforce — and here comes along ICE — trying to pull those officers away.”
Law enforcement experts say that outside of California, especially in lower income states, many young officers take home about as much as public school teachers, making the opportunity for newer hires to jump ship for a federal gig even more enticing.
Some fear the ICE hiring spree will attract problematic candidates.
“The scariest part keeping me up at night is you hear agencies say we’re lowering standards because we can’t hire,” said Justin Biedinger, head of Guardian Alliance Technologies, which streamlines background checks, applicant testing and other qualifications for law enforcement agencies.
At the same time, the Trump administration is finding ways to deputize local cops without actually hiring them.
The Department of Homeland Security has dramatically overhauled a controversial cooperation program called 287(g) that enlists local police officers and sheriff’s deputies to do the work of ICE agents.
As of early September, according to the program website, 474 agencies in 32 states were participating, up from 141 agencies in March.
Some states such as Georgia and Florida require their agencies to apply for the program. Others, including California, forbid it.
But that, too, could soon change.
The administration is exploring ways to force holdouts to comply, including by conditioning millions of dollars of funding for domestic violence shelters, rape crisis hotlines and child abuse centers on compliance with its immigration directives. In response, California and several other states have sued.
Even in so-called sanctuary jurisdictions such as Los Angeles, where local laws prohibit cops from participating in civil immigration enforcement, police officers have found themselves tangled up in federal operations. The LAPD has drawn criticism for officers responding to the scenes of ICE arrests where confrontations have erupted.
“We get called a lot to come out and assist in providing security or making sure that it doesn’t turn violent,” said Marvel, the police advocacy organization president.
“The vast majority of peace officers do not want to do immigration enforcement because that’s not the job they signed up for,” Marvel said. “We want to protect the community.”
Among the agency’s most vocal critics, the push to beef up ICE is viewed as both dangerous and counterproductive.
“Punishing violent criminals is the work of local and state law enforcement,” said Ilya Somin, law professor at George Mason University and a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute. “If we were to abolish ICE and devote the money to those things, we’d have lower violence and crime.”
The cash and perks ICE is dangling will inevitably draw more people, experts said, but some warned that newly minted deportation officers should be careful about mortgaging their future.
The potential $50,000 hiring bonus is paid out in installments over several years — and the role may lack job security.
At the same time Trump is doubling ICE’s headcount, he’s also rewriting the rules to make it far easier to ax federal workers, said Sandweg, the former Obama official.
That could come back to haunt many agency recruits four years from now, he said: “I think there’s a very good chance a future Democratic administration is going to eliminate a lot of these positions.”
Zurie Pope, a Times fellow with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, contributed to this report.
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