ICE’s hiring spree led to recruits of ‘questionable qualifications,’ adding to pattern

After congressional Republicans and the White House threw an obscene amount of money at Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year, ensuring that ICE is far better funded than other law enforcement agencies, the agency had little choice but to go on an aggressive hiring spree.

That hasn’t gone especially well.

The Atlantic reported last fall, for example, on an ICE training academy where more than a third of the new recruits failed a relatively easy personal fitness test. (The report highlighted an email from ICE headquarters to the agency’s top officials that lamented having many “athletically allergic candidates.”) Around the same time, NBC News ran a related report that noted many ICE recruits had been sent home after failing to pass a written exam — in which they were “allowed to consult their textbooks and notes.”

But The Associated Press moved the ball forward with new reporting on the consequences of the agency lowering its standards. From the AP report:

Two bankruptcies and six law enforcement jobs in three years. An allegation of lying in a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman — an incident that led to a $75,000 settlement and criticism of his integrity. A third job candidate once failed to graduate from a police academy, then lasted only three weeks in his only job as a police officer.

Their common bond: All were hired recently by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during an unprecedented hiring spree — 12,000 new officers and special agents to double its force — after the agency received a $75 billion windfall from Congress to enact President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The AP also reported that ICE has been engaged in such “rapid-fire recruitment and hiring” that it has hired new employees “with questionable qualifications” and that applicants with “questionable histories” were brought on “in spite of their past.”

Claire Trickler-McNulty, who served as an ICE official during the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, told the outlet, “If vetting is not done well and it’s done too quickly, you have higher risk of increased liability to the agency because of bad actions, abuse of power and the lack of ability to properly carry out the mission because people don’t know what they are doing.”

Complicating matters is the familiarity of the circumstances. The Justice Department, for example, has lowered its standards for newly hired federal prosecutors. In February, Reuters reported on the FBI lowering its standards to make it easier for existing employees to become agents. Before that, the Republican administration also lowered standards on the qualifications to serve as an immigration judge.

By some measures, the entirety of the Trump presidency has been a grand experiment in what happens when an administration embraces amateurism and deprofessionalization.

Trump has informally lowered the standards for what it takes to lead the FBIwhat it takes to serve in the Cabinetwhat it takes to serve as a U.S. attorneywhat it takes to be a success in the private sector and what it takes to serve as vice president.

The president himself was, in the recent past, a television reality show host who didn’t know anything about governing, had never served a day in any public post and arguably had no business running to serve as the chief executive of the world’s preeminent superpower.

Trumpism, in other words, is defined in large part by a lowering of standards. The ICE example is dramatic, but it’s part of a pattern.

There are real consequences to this: Departments and agencies stripped of professional standards are more easily manipulated.

The more this happens, in other words, the more the White House confronts a more compliant and obedient federal bureaucracy.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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.”