The Department of Homeland Security is positively awash in cash to hire Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons galore, but it turns out that all that money is not enough to buy even marginal talent.
NBC News is out with a report about ICE’s current training regime, or lack thereof, and it’s tough to figure out what part is worst. Is it the part where new recruits are starting training before DHS has finished vetting them, a thing that seems sort of suboptimal for law enforcement jobs? Is it the part where ICE only figures out mid-training that recruits have failed drug tests, have criminal backgrounds, or can’t meet the physical and academic requirements? Is it the part where recruits don’t submit their fingerprints for background checks even though ICE requires that as part of the hiring process?
Oooh, wait! How about the recruit who had a charge for strong-arm robbery and battery? From a domestic violence incident? Simply the best people.
Look, the administration is doing everything it can to smooth the path forward for wannabe fascists, but how much more can they do? Training had been slashed from 13 weeks to eight, and is now down to six weeks. The fitness requirements are startlingly low-key for a job that ostensibly requires you to be able to chase people down, but more than a third of the new recruits couldn’t do the required 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.
Almost half of the new recruits who arrived for training in the last three months were sent home because they couldn’t pass an open-book written exam on the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Fourth Amendment. To be fair, it isn’t like the administration cares if any of these people follow the law, but presumably they have to go through this fiction.
And ICE is pulling out all the stops to get recruits in the door. ICE and Border Patrol retirees are being wooed back with the promise of up to a $50,000 hiring bonus.
Also, no more pesky age limits! “Border czar” and bribe aficionado Tom Homan says age is only a number, baby! “I'm 63 and I love to put a badge and gun on and go out there and do these things,” Homan said in August.
The administration is trying to make all of this look less pathetic, explaining that these are just the new recruits that suck. Experienced law enforcement officers don’t have to go through the fitness test but can instead “self-certify” that they are plenty fit.
The administration wants more agents because it is convinced that part of the bottleneck in hitting the 3,000/day arrest goal set by deputy White House chief of staff and Chief Nazi Stephen Miller is a lack of staff. Surely, if there are thousands more ICE agents, they will be able to arrest even more people with no criminal records to try to hit the mark.
Meanwhile, any federal law enforcement that isn’t about hurting immigrants is on hold, as the administration froze all other training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, preventing dozens of other federal law enforcement agencies from training.
Trump can shower all the money on people and eliminate every last training requirement, but it doesn’t seem like it is possible to water down the requirements much more than they already are. They’ll probably just get rid of all the physical and academic requirements, knock out the rule that you can’t have a criminal background, and just give the worst people in the country weapons and unfettered power.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
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