It looks like Stephen Miller’s quest to hire 10,000 so-called “Homeland Defenders” by January isn’t going so well.
During a multi-agency meeting earlier this week, Miller voiced frustration that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasn’t bringing in deportation officers fast enough, CNN reported Thursday. Meanwhile, multiple sources told CNN that ICE has struggled to process the sudden surge of applicants after the agency dangled a $50,000 signing bonus in front of their noses, in the hopes of enticing Americans to join the legion of law enforcement officials ripping families apart.
“It’s a shit show,” an administration official told CNN.
One senior ICE official told CNN that “HR is not equipped to hire en masse,” adding, “No one has support staff to support this.” In fact, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has had to lend out some personnel to help handle ICE’s influx of applications, which DHS reports has skyrocketed to 175,000.
ICE officials are really feeling the strain once new recruits arrive for the agency’s training program, where more than 200 applicants have already been terminated from the program because they did not meet the physical or academic requirements, one source told CNN.
Sources told NBC News Wednesday that multiple new recruits had arrived for training without being properly vetted, and just under 10 were turned away due to disqualifying criminal backgrounds or failed drug testing. At ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, staff discovered one recruit had previously been involved in a domestic violence incident, and was once charged with strong-arm robbery and battery. DHS officials told NBC News that other recruits in the six-week training course had not submitted their fingerprints for background checks, which is required by ICE.
CNN reported that in one case, ICE gave a conditional offer to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, which was only caught by the DEA. In another case, an individual had a pending gun charge.
These mistakes come as the Trump administration has attempted to speed up the onboarding process, which used to take months, into a partially remote process that only takes 47 days, CNN reported.
Scott Shuchart, former head of policy at ICE during the Biden administration, suggested that the Trump administration had gone too far in attempting to streamline the process.“They’re trying to do something borderline impossible and they’re doing it too fast,” he told CNN.
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