The Republicans’ domestic policy megabill, which Donald Trump signed into law in July, was remarkable in a great many ways, but one of the underappreciated elements of the far-right package was how much money it threw at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The overall bill set aside $150 billion for immigration enforcement, with about $30 billion of that total going directly to ICE. To put that in context, Republicans nearly quadrupled the agency’s budget and ensured that ICE is far better funded than other law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
In practical terms, this doesn’t just mean that the agency is suddenly flush with taxpayer cash. It also means ICE is hiring a lot of new personnel. The White House has said it intends to double the agency’s workforce, including 10,000 new deportation officers whom the president wants to deploy in January.
Its recruiting efforts, however, aren’t going especially well.
The Atlantic reported this week, for example, on the latest from an ICE training academy in Georgia, where more than a third of the new recruits have failed a relatively easy personal fitness test (do 15 pushups and 32 situps, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes).
One career ICE official told The Atlantic that the failure rate is “pathetic.” The same report highlighted a recent email from ICE headquarters to the agency’s top officials that lamented having many “athletically allergic candidates.”
As brutal as these details are, the scope of the problem is apparently even broader. NBC News reported: Immigration and Customs Enforcement has placed new recruits into its training program before they have completed the agency’s vetting process, an unusual sequence of events as it rushes to hire federal immigration officers. … ICE officials only later discovered that some of the recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said. According to the report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC, “nearly half of new recruits who’ve arrived for training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center over the past three months were later sent home because they couldn’t pass the written exam, according to the data. The academic requirement includes an exam in which officers are allowed to consult their textbooks and notes at the end of a legal course.” Or put another way, almost half of these recruits failed an open-book test. I won’t pretend to know what the White House and ICE officials intend to do about this, but it’ll be worth watching to see if the agency lowers its standards to make it easier to deploy to American streets these “athletically allergic” agents who can’t copy answers out of a book to pass an exam.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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