WASHINGTON (AP) — The agency charged with carrying out President Donald Trump’s large‑scale deportation agenda says it has already issued tentative job offers to more than 1,000 people as it seeks to boost hiring as an initiative that delivered a massive funding infusion was enacted earlier this month.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said on Thursday in a statement that the offers were made after July 4, when Trump signed a broad package of tax cuts and spending measures that also included roughly $170 billion for border security and immigration enforcement over five years.
“ICE has already issued more than 1,000 tentative job offers since July 4. Many of these offers were for ICE officers who left during the Biden administration out of frustration at not being allowed to do their jobs,” McLaughlin said, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Now, with President Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, ICE is excited to get back to work to remove from our communities rapists, murderers, gang members, and pedophiles.”
The Budget Multiplies
ICE is the principal agency responsible for carrying out Trump’s campaign promise to execute the largest deportation operation in the nation’s history. The administration has been increasing immigration-related detentions across the United States. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has said ICE officers should target at least 3,000 arrests per day, compared with about 650 per day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
That uptick has been evident in arrests at immigration courts, workplaces, and neighborhoods, among other locations.
ICE will receive $76.5 billion, nearly ten times its current annual budget. About $45 billion will go toward expanding detention capacity. Nearly $30 billion is dedicated to hiring 10,000 more employees so the agency can meet its goal of one million deportations per year. The White House has said ICE staffing will rise from about 20,000 to roughly 30,000 employees.
ICE announced earlier this week a recruitment push aimed at finding and hiring the deportation agents, investigators, and lawyers needed to reach its goal of adding 10,000 more workers. As part of that effort, the agency is offering a signing bonus of up to $50,000 for new recruits, in addition to benefits such as student loan forgiveness and plenty of overtime for the agents.
At a time when the federal government has been laying off federal workers left and right, the USAJOBS website, where federal job openings are posted, has dozens of postings in Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Some of them are for agents responsible for locating and removing people from the country; units for National Security Investigations, which assist in investigations of transnational crimes, including immigration matters; and lawyers who represent the government in immigration cases.
Jobs Supporting the Detention Network
But there are also other roles in support of the detention network that is being expanded to carry out large-scale deportations: nurses and nurse managers, mental health care providers, auditors, field medical coordinators, and more.
The anticipated hiring surge has also raised concerns about whether standards will be lowered to meet the growing demand. The Border Patrol experienced its own expansion in the early 2000s, an episode often cited as an example of the risks of rapid hiring. To meet hiring targets, changes were made to training and hiring standards, and arrests of employees for misconduct increased.
McLaughlin rejected the insinuations that the agency would lower its recruitment standards.
“All new recruits must meet the same standards they have always held. I know this may be startling to the press, but many Americans want to serve their country and help remove the worst illegal criminals from our communities,” she said.
