Alex Nowrasteh
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed by President Trump in July 2025, allocates $45 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire 10,000 additional Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers (deportation agents), in addition to expanding the domestic detention space and deporting more immigrants. If such a hiring binge succeeded, the number of deportation agents would increase by 164 percent in a short period of time. Corruption prosecutions and terminations for poor behavior skyrocketed the last time the federal government increased immigration enforcement so much in such a short period of time. Corruption and misconduct in ICE-ERO will rise sharply without more oversight.
The government doubled the number of Border Patrol agents in 2002–2010, growing the force from about 10,000 to over 20,000 as part of the general federal security overreaction to the 9/11 attacks. During that time and in the years after, the firings of Border Patrol agents for incompetence, misconduct, or illegal behavior skyrocketed alongside the number prosecuted for corruption or other crimes. Border Patrol has always had serious problems with discipline and corruption, but it was compounded after 9/11 when the government went on a hiring spree. At the same time, Border Patrol’s internal affairs office was weakened after that agency was folded into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Standards and training times were also lowered to meet their hiring goals.
Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility (CBP-OPR) is Border Patrol’s internal affairs. It was tiny with only 218 internal affairs investigators for a workforce of about 60,000 employees, or about one internal affairs officer per 271 law enforcement officers, during the time when corruption and disciplinary issues were rampant. By contrast, the New York Police Department (NYPD) had one internal affairs investigator for about every 65 sworn officers. Disciplinary, misconduct, and criminal problems inside the Border Patrol have since improved considerably, but it never should have gotten so bad in the first place.
Since ICE’s expansion is regrettably inevitable, it’s important to prevent a surge of corruption and incompetence in the agency while it grows. ICE has 251 criminal investigators in its internal affairs (ICE-OPR) office, a ratio of 82 employees for each internal affairs investigator. To meet the NYPD ratio, ICE-OPR should hire 220 additional criminal investigators and a similar number of support staff, and their hiring should be prioritized to deter corruption from the beginning.
ICE should not lower standards any further for ICE-ERO agents or ICE-OPR investigators like Border Patrol did 20 years ago. ICE is offering a $50,000 signing bonus, student loan forgiveness and repayment, huge bonuses for special agents, uncontrolled overtime for others, and higher retirement benefits in addition to all the taxpayer-subsidized perks of being a unionized federal worker. ICE will lower standards further when those inducements don’t meet their hiring goals, especially as many applicants are accepted and fail out during training, which will disappoint administration officials after they initially bragged about the number of employment offers made. ERO had an academy attrition rate of 12.2 percent in 2017, which could double or triple in the next year. Those staffing problems are in addition to the normal attrition rate of about 4 percent per year.
Even supporters of ICE’s expansion should demand maintaining high standards and preemptively expanding ICE-OPR. ICE’s popularity is plunging for good reasons. Part of ICE’s drop in popularity is for so-called thermostatic reasons, where the public predictably reacts against current policy. But much of it is also a reaction to ICE pulling people out of cars, arresting American citizens, and wearing intimidating masks in public. More contact between ICE agents and Americans will increase opportunities for corruption, crime, and misconduct that could cause enormous scandals.
Gil Kerlikowske, former commissioner of the Border Patrol’s parent agency of Customs and Border Protection, warned that, “If they [ICE] don’t uphold pretty rigorous standards and background checks, you can end up hiring the wrong people, and then you pay a huge price in how the public perceives them.”
ICE termination rates for disciplinary, performance, and misconduct reasons are below Border Patrol, Customs Agents, and the Bureau of Prisons for the last year where I have data, but higher than the FBI, DEA, and Secret Service. ICE is not the worst agency on these metrics, but it’s worse than several that have faced severe scrutiny and condemnation over the years.
My prediction is that ICE will heed none of my warnings because the Trump administration is focused on deporting people and doesn’t care how. A government that “declares an invasion” and activates wartime laws to deport mostly peaceful workers doesn’t care about maintaining hiring standards, nor will it be bothered by corruption scandals. Expect massive surges in corruption, misconduct, cover-ups, and terminations as the government hires 10,000 additional ICE-ERO agents with lowered standards and less oversight.