Do ICE Recruits Know How to Read?

By Jacob Weindling | October 23, 2025 | 2:24pm

Photo by Department of Homeland Security

Immigration ICE

You should know that I have deep respect for Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, and would not evoke it without having the goods. This revelation comes to us via NBC Boston, who is reporting on ICE’s struggles to recruit new Gestapo agents to bravely wear masks, hop out of unmarked vans and kidnap day laborers off American streets and out of Home Depots who are happy to associate their brand with fascist collaboration. While NBC reports familiar stories of ICE recruits like one who had “previously been charged with strong arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident,” or how “some recruits going through the six-week training course had not submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires,” there was another segment of this report that caught mine and many others’ eye.

“Nearly half of new recruits who’ve arrived for training at FLETC over the past three months were later sent home because they could not pass the written exam, according to the data,” reported NBC Boston. “The academic requirement includes an exam where officers are allowed to consult their textbooks and notes at the end of a legal course on the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Fourth Amendment, which outlines when officers can and cannot conduct searches and seizures.”

Most Popular

Given that half of this new wave of ICE recruits cannot pass an open-book written test, it’s fair to ask why. One possible reason is that an open-book exam is meaningless to someone who is illiterate. Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny would absolutely be in that half of new recruits who can’t pass this simple exam where you have access to the answers, so how many others are in there like him? What is the literacy bar needed to pass the ICE exam anyway? Because their illegal actions across America prove that an understanding of what the Fourth Amendment says clearly is not one of them.

These aren’t the only embarrassing revelations about some of America’s most enthusiastic fascists signing up to be Trump’s jack-booted thugs, as another recent report in The Atlantic found that “more than a third [of recruits] have failed [the fitness test] so far, four officials told me,” and that “to pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.”

No joke, that’s roughly what my middle school baseball coach ran us through at the beginning of every season. Keep that in mind if an ICE agent is ever chasing you down trying to violate your Fourth Amendment rights. “It’s pathetic” one career ICE official told The Atlantic. Yes it is, but that’s because ICE is a fundamentally pathetic agency who attracts like-minded recruits! It has long been regarded as the agency who accepts all the recruits the real agencies and police departments reject, and it has been at the core of many complaints since its inception about how the Department of Homeland Security would inevitably violate our constitutional rights at home.

While the number of resources allocated for this new Praetorian Guard in Trump’s bill is terrifying, that doesn’t mean people will just take it, and it certainly doesn’t mean that qualified people will. Law enforcement agencies across the country are having recruiting issues right now, and many are bristling at ICE’s open advertisements on TV to pluck their more competent members from their ranks. Are they running these ads because a bunch of ICE’s new recruits can’t read and are too weak and out of shape to make a middle school baseball team? Based on recent reporting, we can’t rule it out for certain!