A Washington Post review of leaked names of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers found an alarming number of hires who, as one expert put it, have “no business having a gun and a badge.”
The Post was able to check the backgrounds of ICE’s new recruits only because of a breach. In late October, activists hacked a Department of Homeland Security employee database and published details on thousands of workers, including roughly 1,500 ICE officers and agents hired during Trump’s second term. DHS has long refused to name its officers, saying it needs to protect them from harassment, even when they’ve been involved in deadly shootings.
Using routine public-records searches, the Post vetted about 300 of the new hires and turned up at least 19 with troubling histories. Those included “misconduct allegations, criminal charges, use-of-force incidents and lawsuits that ended in settlements.” At least six had previously been fired, stripped of their certification or pushed to resign. Some had already been judged unfit for duty by other police agencies.
Several of the new officers have already run into trouble at ICE. At least two were involved in shootings in recent months, including one in Maine in which a young Colombian father was killed. The agency has also let go of some recruits after belatedly discovering problems in their backgrounds.
The hires came during an aggressive recruiting drive in which DHS called on Americans to “defend the homeland” and dangled bonuses of up to $50,000. According to the report, by January, the department said it had brought on 12,000 officers, meaning the Post’s review examined only a sliver of the new workforce.
John Roth, a former DHS inspector general who was among three experts who reviewed the findings, said the cases point to weak vetting or relaxed standards.
“This is a pretty bad list of conduct,” Roth told the Post. “Absent some other kinds of facts that would exculpate some of these people, they have no business having a gun and a badge in the federal workforce.”
Peter Mina, who previously ran ICE’s labor and employment division before serving in DHS’s civil rights office, said lawsuits against applicants should, at minimum, “be flagged to ICE and reviewed.” He warned that speeding up hiring creates risks for the public, the agency and the officers.
“When you have a hiring process like this — where it’s quick and you’re missing stuff, as we’ve seen — inevitably that results in hiring people that probably shouldn’t have been,” he said.
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