ICE Is Firing Some New Hires

WaPo reports that ICE has been (quietly) firing some of its new hires:

The hiring happened so quickly that many new officers were put on the streets before being adequately vetted, multiple former officials said. An ICE whistleblower urged officials to halt the massive expansion, saying in a memo to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General in August 2025 that the “overwhelmed” agency had hired officers without checking their fingerprints or their identities....

[A] whistleblower, who oversaw a staff of 100 in ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which manages background investigations for job applicants, said he had never seen the agency hire people so quickly. Human resources personnel made final job offers before preliminary vetting was complete. Applicants were cleared for duty “without fingerprints, identity verification, or credit checks,” he wrote.

Some new agents were hired without ever being interviewed by ICE.

One agent interviewed said that he and another hire were not required to attend basic training because they had previously held policing jobs. "Instead, the two sat in a room together and took an online ICE training program to learn about processing paperwork for people who were arrested."

[Another] officer said he had about a week of in-person training on firearms and defensive tactics, and also was allowed to skip ICE’s training academy. But he said that the online deportation officer course lacked rigor and that many recruits “kind of clicked through it, which was scary, because it was actual immigration law.”