A key component of President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” loaded with tax cuts and massive reductions in Medicaid and nutrition assistance funding, was an enormous budgetary surge for hiring at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with an unprecedented $170 billion budget that gives ICE more funding for prisons than the entire U.S. federal prison system, and a tripling of ICE’s annual operating funds.
But all this has a big problem, noted American Immigration Council fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: that funding will run out in less than four years — and all the thousands of new hires to the agency might have to be let go just as abruptly.
Reichlin-Melnick, a frequent critic of Trump’s immigration policy, made the observation in response to a new report in The Washington Post that ICE plans “to spend $100 million to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted ad campaign, part of what the agency called a ‘wartime recruitment’ strategy to hire thousands of officers” — featuring ads with taglines like “Destroy The Flood” and “The Enemies Are At The Gates.”
“Virtually all the money for this explosion in staff evaporates on October 1, 2029, meaning the agency will likely have to fire thousands of people unless Congress steps in and gives them billions and billions of dollars more for their annual budget,” wrote Reichlin-Melnick on X.
This comes amid other reports that reveal ICE is facing a number of obstacles in the recruiting process.
In particular, more than a third of prospective recruits this year failed the basic fitness test after they lied on their applications and Homeland Security officials loosened the screening process to try to increase the rate of hiring, creating an awkward situation as many of them had already been given job offers and needed to be reassigned.
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