Everything you guessed about the recruiting of ICE agents appears to be true. Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn't properly vetting them. And in one case, a recruit had previously been charged with strong-arm robbery and battery. Others failed drug tests, and some have criminal backgrounds.
Via NBC News:
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 to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, a current and two former Homeland Security Department officials told NBC News.
ICE officials only later discovered that some of the recruits failed drug testing, had disqualifying criminal backgrounds, or didn’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said.
Staff members at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong-arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found, as recently as this month, that some recruits going through the six-week training course hadn’t submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said.
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Since the surge began, ICE has dismissed more than 200 new recruits while they were in training for falling short of its hiring requirements, according to recently collected internal ICE data reviewed by NBC News.
The majority of them failed to meet ICE’s physical or academic standards, according to the data. Just under 10 recruits were dismissed for criminal charges, failing to pass drug tests or safety concerns that should have been flagged in background checks before they arrived at training, the data indicated and the current and former DHS officials confirmed.
The officials said there is growing concern that in the Trump administration’s race to expand the number of ICE agents to 10,000 by the end of the year, the agency could miss red flags in the backgrounds of some new recruits and inadvertently hire them.
“There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” the current DHS official said. The official said many of the issues that have been flagged during training surface only because the recruits admitted they didn’t submit to fingerprinting or drug testing before they arrived.
(ICE) was created in 2003 as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 in response to the September 11th attacks. However, Trump is spending millions more on weapons for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to descend on American cities and give them “guided missile warheads.”
