The Worst of ICE is Yet to Come: A Look at the $170 Billion Plan to Build Trump's Rogue Internal Security Force

More American gulags and even worse ICE Agents are coming our way, courtesy of the reality TV president and the cringing cowards and toadies of the House and Senate Republican majorities

By Adrian Carrasquillo The Bulwark

For all the Trump Administration’s talk of saving money and increasing “government efficiency,” the president demanded that huge amounts be appropriated in the Republicans’ recent budget bill to fund his mass-deportation program.

In all, $170 billion was set aside to be spent over the next four years for border and immigration enforcement. This total includes $45 billion to create a sprawling detention system (nearly five timesthe annual budget for the Bureau of Prisons); $30 billion for ICE operations; $46.6 billion for more border wall construction, and, as if that weren’t enough, a new $10 billion border patrol slush fund.

This level of funding is unprecedented. ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country. And that fact raises a question: What exactly are they going to do with all that money?

The Trump administration now has the budget to make its wildest fantasies of mass deportation come true, regardless of whether Americans even want it. (They increasingly don’t.)

That will mean more legal and human rights abuses and more facilities built. The Everglades detention center may have a stupid name that thrills Republican fans, but the treatment of detainees there is no joke, and neither is the fact that the administration plans to stand up similar facilities in other friendly states.

All the worst people. But the next terror won’t arrive in the form of concrete and barbed wire. It’s the people who are going to be recruited to staff the new camps. To keep pace with the administration’s unquenchable thirst for arrests, deportations, and cruelty, ICE is using its billions of new dollars to go on a hiring spree—and, to borrow a phrase, they’re unlikely to send their best.

Trump wants to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, the equivalent of roughly 50 percent of the current total manpower of the agency, along with 3,000 new border patrol agents. And he wants to do it fast, the better to help reach Stephen Miller’s arbitrary and increasingly unrealistic goal of one million deportations in 2025.

Experts warn that whenever the priority becomes hiring law enforcement agents quickly, standards immediately collapse and misconduct follows. This is a lesson the George W. Bush administration learned as it raced to expand Customs and Border Protection.

The collapse in standards happens in two ways when the government rushes to fill law enforcement jobs—and both could dramatically worsen the already troubling mass-deportation campaign.

The first involves recruitment: What kind of people are signing up? Are they doing so for the right reasons? Are they qualified? Are they capable of doing the job competently and responsibly?

The second is training: Are they prepared to do their job, handle its stresses and difficulties, and respond to uncertainty when they’re given a badge and a gun and thrown onto America’s streets?

Jason Houser, who was chief of staff at ICE in the Biden administration and a Homeland Security counterterrorism official, tells me it normally takes twelve to eighteen months to recruit someone, vet them, and do background checks.

“Proud Boys and insurrectionists.” To demonstrate the difficulty of finding qualified applicants, he pointed to another part of DHS, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has been trying to hire 15,000 people for the last fifteen years. CBP, he said, has traditionally been more stringent about handing out security clearances than other agencies, which further slows the process of hiring border patrol agents.

Each background check, Houser said, can take between six and nine months.

The purpose of looking into each recruit’s history is to filter out those who have a criminal record, have problems with drug use, or hold extremist views. In a rush to fill the ranks, those background checks, including a dive into what they’ve posted on social media, could be rushed or skipped altogether.

Scott Shuchart, a former assistant director of ICE under Biden, told Slate that he worried that many new ICE recruits would be “Proud Boys and other insurrectionists.”

“This administration is led by criminals,” he said, “and they’re going to keep doing unlawful and terrible things.”

Experts I spoke with agreed. One noted that we wouldn’t have arrived at a point where a father of three U.S. marines got his head pounded on the ground if things were going normally, referring to a disturbing recent episode involving ICE agents.

Andrea Flores, who served as the director of border management on Biden’s National Security Council, grew up in the border community of Las Cruces, New Mexico, spending time in El Paso, Texas as well. She said the first time she was accosted by a CBP agent was leaving her middle school when she was 12. Now, Americans can expect to see agents like these in their local Target—and they can expect more mistakes from agents, as well.

“This record hiring spree for CBP and ICE is going to make Americans experience what your usual black and brown resident already knew,” she said. “It has been a problem when border patrol has not had enough to do.”

But even if the administration is willing and able to keep extremists out of law enforcement, it’s still inviting potentially bad outcomes.

“Just to show how bad this could be, an ICE agent class at the law enforcement center is 24 to 36 people, and ICE normally puts through 800 to 1,000 a year,” said Houser. “To get to 10,000 hires, you’re going to have to exponentially grow the number of classes—times 10 or times 20. Ask yourself, who is going to be doing the training, especially [because] . . . the only part they care about is the removal side, while collapsing the standards of people coming in” to do the enforcement work.

With that many classes, Houser said, there would be fewer skilled instructors and less time to go through the full training program, including for topics like Title 8 immigration authority at the border, tear gas, de-escalation, mass-casualty events, and riot policing.

But that might not even be the worst part.

A recipe for disaster. Houser painted an even darker picture for me: He told me that instead of hiring 10,000 ICE new agents as official government employees, the administration could, if it wanted, instead hire them as contractors. It has that kind of flexibility under the new law—and he predicted that they’ll use it, akin to how the military sometimes leans on contractors in global hotspots.

“This is a recipe for disaster,” Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the Immigration Hub advocacy group, told The Bulwark. “Without a full background check or the right experience, you’re going to hire people who are abusive, when there’s already rampant sexual abuse in facilities.”

Flores said that the administration is trying to eliminate the logistical constraints on the number of people it can deport.

The first constraint is the number of officers who can go out and arrest people—hence the goal of 10,000 new hires. The next constraint is those officers’ ability to go out and arrest people when, where, and how they want—hence the agency’s new policy of masking its officers, displaying neither names nor badge numbers, and allowing them to conduct arrests anywhere, even at churches and outside schools.

The last constraint was detention capability.

This ICE is solving both by using non-detention facilities to hold people it’s arrested and by housing them at newly constructed temporary facilities like the Everglades detention center. Now, Flores said, the administration has ample money for a system that has been reoriented “purely around arrests, detention, and removals.”

“Where I’m most concerned is we will have people who aren’t trained running facilities where people are being held,” Flores told me. “I used to work in temporary construction—people die in those.”

Adrian Carasquillo covers immigration for The Bulwark. Subscribe to his “Huddled Masses” newsletter here.

Image: Adam Kinzinger.