It’s Not As Easy to Staff ICE As Trump Thinks

By Jacob Weindling | August 6, 2025 | 12:46pm

Photo by DHSgov

Immigration ICE

It’s Not As Easy to Staff ICE As Trump Thinks

The Republican budget bill has a lot of horrific aspects to it, and the funds earmarked for ICE, Trump’s secret police, is perhaps the most alarming. The agency whose job is to cover their faces, then emerge from unmarked cars without identifying themselves and kidnap people will receive $29.9 billion directly, among a larger package of $170 billion dedicated to immigration and border enforcement related funding. This is a larger budget than the Marines. Trump has weaponized America’s depraved and bipartisan immigration policies against us.

But actually spending this money is much more difficult than passing a Trump-approved law through a bootlicking Congressional GOP majority, as ICE is learning. They’ve already angered Trump-supporting American sheriffs by trying to poach people from their ranks, proving again that just because you throw a bunch of money at something, that doesn’t mean it solves every issue.

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ICE has long had problems with recruiting. All law enforcement in America does, as Trump’s coalition even acknowledges in places like America First Policy Institute, who wrote “A 2019 survey of law enforcement executives found that 78 percent of responding agencies had difficulty recruiting qualified candidates.” The Office of the Inspector General (IG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) filed a report in 2023 claiming that “[US Customs and Border Protection] and ICE’s current method of managing law enforcement staffing is unsustainable.” ICE can’t hire good people is something of a dog bites man story, and it existed long before Trump drafted the agency to be his Praetorian Guard. Even Bill Kristol can now see how big of a mistake it was to create DHS, and ICE continually scraping from the bottom of the barrel of law enforcement recruits who alienate their own criminal investigators has only made it more obvious as time has gone on.

But now that they have the resources to address the staffing challenges that the DHS IG detailed, ICE still seems to be struggling to find people to take its blood money. The American Prospect reported today that “A number of employees with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were informed via email late on Tuesday that they have been reassigned, effective immediately, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The workers had seven days to accept the reassignment, under threat of being removed from the civil service.” You know that demand to work at ICE is booming when the government has to threaten to fire FEMA employees if they don’t take their mandated job at ICE.

ICE has offered new gestapo officers a $50,000 signing bonus, student debt relief, a bounty for arrests that lead to quick deportations that was quickly rescinded as soon as the New York Times got their hands on the memo, and now today, enthusiastic puppy murderer, concentration camp visiter and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that those perks to help recruit new agents are going so great that ICE is going to “waive age limits for new applicants.”

Conscripting FEMA workers and recruiting teenagers…this does not sound like an agency that is overcoming its “unsustainable” method of “managing law enforcement staffing.” The classic saying that dollars can’t buy sense sure seems like it’s being proven yet again by ICE, long regarded by all the other law enforcement agencies as the one housing America’s most incompetent aggro-chuds.