As headlines teem with stories of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers beating protestors, holding children hostage, and murdering people in cold blood, you might be wondering: who the hell hired these guys? As it turns out, AI played a huge role.
According to NBC, when ICE identifies a recruit with prior law enforcement experience, it assigns them to its “Law Enforcement Officer Program.” This is a four-week online course meant to streamline training for those already familiar with the legal aspects of the gig. Everyone else gets shipped off to ICE’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia for an eight-week in-person academy. This more rigorous training includes courses in immigration law, gun handling, physical fitness exams, and more.
Yet rather than assign a human to make that call, ICE’s human resources department outsourced the task to an untested large language model (LLM). This AI system was supposed to scan new recruits’ resumes in order to place them in one of the two programs; instead, it automatically flagged the “majority of new applicants” for the fast-track course regardless of their prior experience, officials familiar with the system told NBC.
“They were using AI to scan resumes and found out a bunch of the people who were LEOs weren’t LEOs,” one official said.
Basically, the AI model had approved any resume containing the word “officer” for the LEO program — which opened the door to anyone from a “mall security officer” to those who simply wrote about their aspirations to become ICE officers to take the expedited training course.
The exact number of inexperienced ICE recruits whisked into the fast lane is unknown. At this point, the agency is said to be actively reassessing its duty rosters to call new recruits back for additional training.
The error was first noticed in “mid-fall,” NBC reports, amidst a hiring surge in which ICE rushed to add some 10,000 officers to its ranks — a quota imposed by the Trump administration. Back in October, MS Now reported that ICE was struggling to meet its hiring goals, even after dropping age requirements for new recruits.
It all comes after ICE’s deadliest year since 2004. Throughout 2025, 32 people died in the agency’s custody, and more than 170 US citizens were detained against their will.
Still, it’s unlikely a few more weeks of training would have made much of a difference in those outcomes. As previous reporting has revealed, those responding to the Trump administration’s fascistic recruiting ads aren’t exactly the cream of the crop. During a December investigation into ICE’s hiring standards, an agency official told the Daily Mail that in some cases, the recruits being sent out into the field can barely read, let alone understand complex immigration law.
“We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English,” an official said. “We even had a 469lb man sent to the academy whose own doctor certified him ‘not at all fit’ for any physical activity.”
The fact that these gung-ho recruits aren’t being weeded out at the start is a horrifying indictment: either agency officials didn’t think to double check the AI’s work, or they didn’t care to. Either way, the horrifying consequences are sure to continue as ICE’s brutal crackdown on American cities rolls ahead.
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