Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s race to hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is being slammed as a full blown mess, with insiders warning that rushed hiring, lowered standards, and big cash bonuses are pulling in recruits who have no business carrying a badge and a gun.
Noem has promised to hit the 10,000 mark as part of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. To get there, ICE has opened the floodgates on recruitment and leaned heavily on signing bonuses and relaxed rules to fill slots fast. But according to multiple investigations, the result looks less like a disciplined law enforcement build up and more like a chaotic intake of unprepared and sometimes dangerous candidates.
An investigation cited by The Independent says ICE has lowered its standards so sharply that the new intake now includes recent high school graduates, people with weak reading skills, and applicants who struggle with basic physical fitness. Some even arrived at the academy with pending criminal charges.
“We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English,” one Department of Homeland Security official told the Daily Mail. “We even had a 469-lb man sent to the academy whose own doctor certified him not at all fit for any physical activity.”
According to those reports, ICE has offered signing bonuses of up to 50,000 dollars to attract recruits, while a 30 billion dollar hiring and expansion push leans heavily on retired law enforcement officers who are brought back for desk jobs or virtual training. Total newcomers with no law enforcement background are being fast tracked to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where instructors have reportedly been “astounded” by what they are seeing in the classroom and on the training field.
Noem’s hiring blitz has “become a ‘circus’ as sloppy vetting and massive bonuses have attracted bottom-of-the-barrel recruits,” the Daily Beast reported, citing internal figures and multiple DHS sources. “Anything that they think may have a pulse, they’re moving through,” one unnamed DHS official told the outlet. The same report described discipline problems, violent incidents, and sexual misconduct allegations involving some of the new trainees.
Insiders say the rush has affected nearly every stage of the process. In some cases, recruits were reportedly flown to the training base in Georgia before their drug test results came back, only for officials to discover later that some had tested positive. Others showed up with tattoos linked to gangs or white supremacist groups that were only spotted when shirts came off for workouts.
Despite the horror stories, the Department of Homeland Security insists that most of the new officers are solid hires. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Independent that “the vast majority of new officers brought on during the hiring surge are experienced law enforcement officers who have already successfully completed a law enforcement academy.” She said this group is expected to make up “greater than 85 percent of new hires,” and stressed that prior service recruits still have to pass medical, fitness, and background checks.
McLaughlin also said DHS has received more than 175,000 applications from “patriotic Americans” interested in joining ICE.
Critics say the numbers do not change the underlying problem, which is the pressure to meet Trump’s target on a short timeline. Training that once ran 16 weeks for some recruits has reportedly been cut to around six, with language modules dropped in favor of translation apps and more reliance on mentoring in the field. Hundreds of trainees have already washed out of the program, while hundreds more are still in the pipeline.
For now, Noem continues to tout the surge as a success story, pointing to application totals and headline recruitment milestones. But as more details leak out from inside the academy in Georgia, the picture that emerges is less one of careful expansion and more of a frantic scramble, where the push to hit 10,000 agents has opened the door to recruits who, in the words of one DHS official, “shouldn’t be hired at all into any federal government job, definitely not one that has a badge and a gun.”
