In a video produced by the Department of Homeland Security this month, two tricked-out ICE vehicles roll around on the National Mall to “Toes” by rapper DaBaby: “My heart so cold I think I’m done with ice (uh, brr) / Said if I leave her, she gon’ die / Well … you done with life.”
The vehicles feature a new ICE logo and DEFEND THE HOMELAND in block letters, painted in a color scheme similar to the president’s private plane. The Lincoln Memorial zips by and DaBaby continues: “Better not pull up with no knife / ’Cause I bring guns to fights.” There’s the White House, the Washington Monument, the U.S. Capitol. On the tinted glass of the pickup, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP is stenciled in all caps, like a production credit.
“What I look like with all this money?” DaBaby asks, more of a taunt than a question.
The 29-second spot—shared on social media earlier this month with the caption “Iced Out” and a freezing-face emoji—treats ICE’s new taxpayer-funded fleet like flashy bling, but it’s a proclamation that the president’s mass-deportation campaign is entering a swaggering new phase. For many longtime Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and agency veterans, the video epitomizes the transformation of ICE from an agency focused on legalistic immigration procedures into a political instrument and propaganda tool.
Most ICE officers and agents prefer to work in plain clothes, focus on finding immigrants who are known criminals, and keep a low profile, especially in major U.S. cities where they are loathed by many, and where some activists use crowdsourcing apps to report their whereabouts in real time. Driving around in “wrapped” vehicles not only blows their cover; it potentially makes them a target for protesters, vandals, and attackers, agency veterans told me.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her small cadre of loyal aides have been pushing the agency to do more showy operations in Democratic-run cities that can advance the president’s agenda—and supply clips for social media and the MAGA faithful. “They love this cowboy shit,” one frustrated ICE official told me.
Rather than pursue time-consuming hunts for “the worst of the worst,” officers are conducting roundups and setting up checkpoints to grab people from their vehicles. Trump officials now want everyone to know ICE is here. The publicity campaign, including the new vehicle design and social-media videos, has been pushed by DHS political appointees in their 20s who have been given positions of power at ICE, according to three agency officials I spoke with who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email that ICE “finally has the money to grow its workforce to support ICE’s mission” as a result of the “Big Beautiful Bill” Trump signed last month. The bill flooded ICE with $75 billion in new funding to spend over the next few years. The agency has an annual budget of about $8 billion. With the money comes a sense of urgency that pervades ICE headquarters, and officials are scrambling to spend quickly, expand aggressively, and take an even more confrontational approach with critics and opponents. Pressure from the White House—including daily conference calls with Stephen Miller—remains constant.
ICE aims to more than double the number of deportation officers on U.S. streets by the end of 2025. The slick cars and the bouncy rap tracks are recruitment tools, they say, along with a “Join ICE” website and an ad blitz using 1940s-style Army posters, many with Uncle Sam, to depict Trump’s deportation campaign as a patriotic war effort, akin to fighting the Nazis. Many of the new hires will enter ICE with different motivations than the generations before them, seeing the position not as a federal-law-enforcement career but as a chance to serve as a foot soldier in Trump’s mission to bring sweeping social and demographic change.
New deportation officers at ICE used to receive about five months of federal-law-enforcement training. Administration officials have cut that time roughly in half, partly by eliminating Spanish-language courses. Academy training was shortened to 47 days, three officials told me, the number picked because Trump is the 47th president. DHS officials said the training will run six days a week for eight weeks.
Trump took office promising millions of deportations a year, a goal so unrealistic that it has doomed career officials at ICE to a perpetual state of missing expectations and constant worry about getting fired. Miller, who specializes in making federal policy out of Trump hyperbole, has tried setting quotas, telling ICE to make 3,000 immigration arrests a day. The agency continues to come up short. Noem has reshuffled ICE’s top leaders and forced out others, criticizing them for not delivering what the president wants.
It’s not for lack of effort. ICE arrests in U.S. cities and communities have jumped fourfold under Trump, the latest government data show. More than 59,000 detainees are in custody across the country and facing deportation, a record, and Trump’s funding bill has given ICE $45 billion to expand detention capacity to more than 100,000 beds. The agency is on track for about 300,000 deportations during the 2025 fiscal year, which ends next month. That would be the highest level in at least a decade.
The new hiring push is preparing ICE for the next phase of Trump’s deportations, targeting major U.S. cities that have “sanctuary” policies that limit cooperation between police and federal immigration authorities. Trump officials have targeted some of those cities—especially Los Angeles, and now Washington, D.C.—but ICE still doesn’t have the staffing to carry out the kind of roundups Miller has been pushing for.
Noem and Corey Lewandowski, the Trump-world fixture who is Noem’s confidant and unofficial chief of staff, have spent the past few months tightening control over ICE through their top appointee, Madison Sheahan, the agency’s deputy director. Sheahan worked as an aide to Noem in South Dakota, and she was running the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries when Noem installed her at ICE in March, initially trying to make her the agency’s top official. Other administration officials objected, and Todd Lyons, a veteran ICE official, has remained in the acting-director role.
Sheahan, whose job consists of running ICE’s “day-to-day operations,” according to her official bio, has alienated many career officials who dislike being bossed around by a 28-year-old who has never worked in immigration enforcement. Eight current and former officials told me that Sheahan affects a brusque, bruising personal manner that they believe she deploys to compensate for her lack of law-enforcement credentials.
“They put her in there because she has a very, very close connection to the secretary, to be her eyes and ears and keep watch on what’s going on,” one official told me. “She’s been demanding a gun and a badge constantly, even though she’s never gone through any training or done anything to earn those things.”
Sheahan has been thrust into a role she’s not ready for, one official said. “When you start from a position of weakness, you have to do things outside of the comfort zone to make it seem like you have authority,” the official told me. There are new framed photos of Sheahan participating in ICE raids hanging outside the executive suites on the 11th floor of the agency’s headquarters, along with photos of Noem, but few of ICE acting director Todd Lyons, two officials told me.
In recent weeks ICE officials have been working out an arrangement that would grant Sheahan limited customs-inspection authority to give her a firearm she could carry inside federal buildings, three officials told me.
McLaughlin said Sheahan does not have a service weapon, and has not sought one. “These attacks on Madison Sheahan’s leadership style have no basis in reality and are rooted in sexism,” McLaughlin wrote. “Madison Sheahan is a work horse, strong executor, and accountable leader.”
Sheahan and Lewandowski accompany Noem when she travels, including during trips to South America. Allegations of an extramarital affair have dogged Lewandowski and Noem for years, and their purported romance is treated at ICE and DHS as an open secret, according to nine current and former officials I spoke with. Lewandowski and Noem have denied the rumors. In April, The Daily Mail published photos of Lewandowski leaving Noem’s condo building with a duffel bag over his shoulder, and The Washington Post reported this month that Noem has been living rent-free for the past several months in a waterfront residence typically occupied by the top Coast Guard commander. DHS said Noem moved there after the Daily Mail article compromised her safety. “This Department doesn’t waste time with salacious, baseless gossip,” McLaughlin said of the alleged affair.
Some White House officials have grown tired of Lewandowski’s presence at DHS, where he is a “special government employee” without a formal job. The frustration has been compounded by a new DHS directive requiring Noem to personally sign off on all DHS contracts over $100,000. Four people told me that the requirement has led to a backlog of delays and missed payments to longtime vendors, and Lewandowski, whose temporary job does not require him to file public financial disclosures, has been acting as a gatekeeper. McLaughlin defended the practice and claimed that the extra oversight has saved billions of dollars.
Several of the current and former officials I spoke with are conservative lifelong cops who believe deeply in immigration enforcement and the role of ICE. They told me they worry that a historic chance to reform the agency will be squandered by incompetence and shady deals with well-connected contractors.
The money provided by Congress “is meant to make up for decades of underfunding,” one career ICE official told me, “and now it will be blown on ridiculousness rather than real improvements that could truly change the way immigration enforcement is conducted.”
California Representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to Noem on Thursday asking for a full accounting of Lewandowski’s tenure at DHS and his role in decision making and contacting deals, as well as his communications with lobbying firms and outside consultants.
“It is deeply concerning that DHS may be allowing a temporary appointee to function as a senior executive without proper appointment, ethics restrictions, transparency or oversight,” Garcia wrote. Several officials have described Lewandowski’s influence over personnel and funding decisions as “far-reaching and unchecked,” he added.
One recent ICE appointee is Chad Kubis, a 26-year-old graphic designer and Liberty University graduate who made promotional videos and ran social-media accounts for Noem when she was the governor of South Dakota. Kubis, who is close to Sheahan, is working on designs to paint the new ICE vehicles. The vehicles and wrappings cost about $100,000 each, contracting records show. ICE plans to wrap at least 2,000 more vehicles, officials told me.
Two officials I spoke with said the marked vehicles can be useful in some circumstances. If a vehicle with the ICE logo shows up and prompts someone to run away, it would give officers the “reasonable suspicion” requirement needed to justify chasing them down, detaining them, and checking their immigration status. McLaughlin said the marked ICE vehicles are “no different from police vehicles,” and won’t jeopardize the ICE workforce.
In addition to the sleek new fleet, Trump officials are reaching back in history to find imagery that they hope will attract a new generation of ICE officers. Trump officials have repurposed U.S. propaganda posters from the 1930s and ’40s that Franklin D. Roosevelt created to fight fascism. AMERICA NEEDS YOU, reads one poster that originally showed Uncle Sam trading his top hat for a factory-worker cap but now features him in an ICE hat. Another image shows him with rolled sleeves and an eagle on his shoulder, marching toward a signing bonus. DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY, it says.
Some posters, though, go considerably further. On one, taken from an image promoting Roosevelt’s New Deal that shows Uncle Sam standing at a crossroads, DHS’s social-media account added the caption “Which way, American man?” It’s a reference to the title of a canonical text for neo-Nazis and white nationalists, the 1978 book by William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man?, which depicts Jews, Black people, and nonwhite immigrants as an existential threat to the United States. As Uncle Sam scratches his head in the new ICE-recruitment poster, signs in one direction point to HOMELAND, SERVICE, and OPPORTUNITY. In the other direction, INVASION and CULTURAL DECLINE.
Trump officials have insisted for months that the goal of their immigration-enforcement campaign is to protect Americans from criminals and gang members, not to change American culture. But the posters suggest otherwise. “A U.S. government agency should not resort to using such language and imagery for any purpose, let alone recruiting people to serve,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement.
The post has gathered nearly 6 million views on the Department of Homeland Security’s X account. Asked about white nationalist messaging, McLaughlin said such concerns were “tiresome.”
“Under the Biden administration, America experienced radical social and cultural decline,” she said. “Our border was flung wide open to a horde of foreign invaders and the rule of law became nonexistent.”
Rapid growth is not the only purpose of the ICE-recruitment effort. Trump officials want to change the agency’s character by flooding it with new hires who are inspired by MAGA ideology rather than by the typical perks of a federal badge. DHS says its recruitment drive has already generated more than 115,000 applications for about 11,000 positions. ICE is preparing to spend $40 million over the next several months to draw even more applicants.
ICE currently has about 5,700 deportation officers, and the administration wants to add 8,000 more by the end of the year through its shortened training courses and by offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and eliminating long-standing requirements, including getting rid of age limits and lowering the minimum age for applicants to 18. “We’re taking father/son bonding to a whole new level,” DHS declared on X with a poster showing two generations of men in military tactical gear.
One ICE official briefed on the hiring plan said that the agency had already sent out about 300 offer letters to recent retirees, who would be able to continue to collect their retirement benefits while drawing a salary. ICE wants to solicit as many retirees as possible, because they can be quickly recertified with online courses and don’t need additional training.
ICE officials told me that they’re also targeting law-enforcement officers already employed by federal, state, and local governments. These recruits can be trained mostly through online courses, and won’t need the firearms and tactical courses normally required of new hires.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said “no subject matter has been cut,” and ICE trainees will “still learn the same elements and meet the same high standards ICE has always required.”
The last group—applicants with no police experience—could include candidates as young as 18. Lyons, the acting ICE director, traveled to Georgia last week to swear in the 59-year-old Lois & Clark actor Dean Cain, and the agency is preparing to make commemorative Superman coins with his likeness, one official told me.
Current and former ICE officials I’ve known for years told me they have little confidence that the hiring surge will be carried out responsibly and raise the professionalism of the agency workforce. “They’re opening it up to everyone who wants to get a badge and a gun,” one veteran official told me.
“We have had enough problems trying to clean up the workforce to make us a really viable law-enforcement organization and get a smarter, stronger, more mature workforce that isn’t gonna make mistakes on the street,” the official said. “And now? You’re gonna get a lot of people who are just power hungry and want authority.”
*Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Paul J. Richard / AFP / Getty; ImageCraft Co / Getty; Katsumi Murouchi / Getty; Nastco / Getty.
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