The NPR Politics Podcast - ICE Recalls Retired Federal Workers To Bolster Its Ranks

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is turning to retired federal workers as it tries to rapidly boost its ranks. We discuss the reasons behind the agency's hiring spree and the challenges it faces in its efforts.This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, immigration policy correspondent Ximena Bustillo, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR's Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems. More information is at waltinfamilyfoundation.org. Hi, this is Jana, recording from the Flat Topps Wilderness Area in Colorado, where I am enjoying the company of the birds. This podcast was recorded at... 106 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, August 7th, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear this.

But I will still be enjoying the songs of the many birds, including the Western Wood Peewee. Enjoy the show. Ooh, identified a bird. That's a skill. That is just, it's so relaxing. It sounds like such a nice place to get away to. Wish I was there. Me too.

Hey there. It's the NPR politics. podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Hima Bustillo and I cover immigration policy. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, we're talking about challenges immigration and customs enforcement or ICE is facing as it tries to hire more people, 10,000 more people to be precise. Hemanah, you've been doing some reporting on this. Like, what jobs is ICE hiring for right now? So first, it's important to understand what makes up ICE. Sure. So ICE isn't necessarily.

just the boots on the ground visuals that everyone has been seeing across their social medias and TVs. There's three parts to ICE. There's that, which is enforcement removal operations. There's Homeland Security investigations, which usually does like drug trafficking, money laundering investigations, not necessarily related to immigration, but these days a lot of those people have been reworked to do immigration work. And then lawyers, you know, people who go into immigration court and sit down at a table and litigate, you know, people's deportation cases. ICE is hiring for all those positions. And they're casting a really wide net to find people to do these jobs. They are the smallest immigration enforcement agency branch out of the

Department of Homeland Security. And, you know, when you think about their numbers, there were about 20,000 people at ICE when this administration started. It was at about the same amount the entire time that Trump was president last time. Only 6,000 people of those 20,000 do what we think stereotypically that ICE does. But they have this mandate to arrest more people and increase deportation. So that's where the push to hire more people comes from. Yeah. And this may be like a smaller agency, but it is pretty polarizing, which I imagine present some hurdles. How is ICE going about this? Like, how are they trying to recruit new workers in this, like, atmosphere? So they've launched a really broad recruitment campaign. They have sent emails to

former federal employees asking them to, quote, return to mission. And these aren't just people that used to work at DHS and now no longer work at DHS, like people who are lawyers at the Agriculture Department, for example, are getting emails to return to mission and now litigate immigration cases for ICE. They are reaching out to local law enforcement, which has been very controversial in, you know, the law enforcement space as, you know, local sheriffs are, you know, raising concerns with, you know, their local people may be getting poached by the federal government. Yeah. And they're making larger promises. So the recent spending and tax bill that Congress passed authorized about $75 billion for ice. Chunks of that, which was to go towards hiring,

this money made ICE the highest funded federal law enforcement agency, even though, again, it is one of the smallest. And so they're offering a lot of monetary incentives. The big number is $50,000. That keep in mind, is spread out over the course of several years. It's not 50 up front, but it's not nothing. And so they really are trying to motivate people to join the cause, essentially, come on board. Immigrations and customs increase the rate of arrests and deportations to pursue the president's goals of a mass deportation policy. You know, it's really tough because, Ashley, as you said, this has become a really polarizing agency and had been one that had a much lower profile previously. And law enforcement having

such a difficult time recruiting generally. I mean, the military does as well. And, you know, when you essentially have half the country that's saying that they disagree with Trump's immigration policies, that they have a negative view of ICE itself, it makes it that much harder to wind up trying to recruit people because it wasn't necessarily seen as a partisan agency before Trump came in. And it had always been an agency as a lot of law enforcement has been a pretty, you know, diverse populations that wind up joining. And it's really difficult, I think, to wind up going in to communities that don't like you, don't accept you and try to convince them to then join your agency. I just think that that's got to be part of one of the big challenges here. Yeah.

I mean, outside of local law enforcement, do we have a sense of like how these tactics are being received, like how people are feeling about this? The campaign started in the last few weeks, and so we still have yet to see how well it's doing. So the Department of Homeland Security says that since they started the recruitment campaign, they've gotten 80,000 applicants. I mean, that being said, we have no idea how that compares to past recruitment efforts, if these applicants are even qualified candidates, and how far in the application process will these 80,000. and applications even make it. You know, folks, you know, over at the Heritage Foundation and other organizations that are tracking this have told me that it takes 12 to 14 months before someone can go from applying a job online to beginning the onboarding process because there's so many steps

between getting polygraphed, getting medical exams, getting security clearances, and then the logistics to do all those things at an unprecedentedly high and fast scale is just not something that this agency is necessarily ready for. Yeah, which kind of brings me to my next question, which is, what problem does hiring 10,000 people solve for the administration when it comes to ICE? So the logistical issue, right, of just not having enough people on the ground to conduct the wide range of arrests that they want related to interior immigration enforcement. So, you know, typically immigration and customs enforcement, they don't deal with the border regions.

They do everything in the internal pockets of the country. So immigration and customs enforcement officers are the ones that are dispatched to conduct immigration arrests, ice raids at work sites, and customs and border protection, which is a separate agency at DHS. You know, they have different responsibility around the border. regions, again, 6,000 people is that number of individuals who are assigned to, you know, do the door knocking, to do the targeted operations. Sometimes they get additional help from other federal agencies. We've seen that increase in supercharge more during this administration as, you know, members of the Federal Bureau of Investigations or the DEA or ATF are being pulled in to assist ICE. but ultimately that can't be the solution forever.

And Domenico, I mean, this all comes at a time when like the rest of the federal workforce you're seeing shrink pretty substantially in some agencies. Like, why do you think this is a priority from a political standpoint for the administration? Well, Trump has said that immigration is the reason that he won, more so than the economy. But deporting everyone essentially was a priority for Trump. All of those who were in the country without permanent legal authorization. And, you know, they had said that they would stress deporting criminals who are in the country. We've seen that other people have gotten wrapped up in that. You know, the White House had said that they had a priority of 3,000 people a day.

But that's been walked back because of the difficulty in being able to have enough ICE agents, enough people to be able to go and identify people to be able to deport them. They don't have enough space to detain everyone. And public opinion has moved against Trump on immigration, which had been a relative. strength when he came into office, but is now reflecting his overall approval rating, which is in the 40s. And that's not a great place to start from to be able to not just recruit, but to be able to follow through in these immigration policies. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. More in a moment. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and

environmental problems. More information is at walton family foundation.org. And we're back. And I want to talk about why ICE is having trouble filling its ranks. What barriers are you seeing so far, Jimena? You know, I've talked to folks who've said that it is a challenge to recruit for a job like this that constantly ranks amongst the lowest on federal employee satisfaction surveys can be very contentious, is politicized. and just takes a really long time to onboard. You get applicants that, you know, want to join the ICE force, and then it takes 12 to 14 months to actually put them through all the steps that they need.

And in that time, they get jobs with other federal agencies. And so then they're no longer applicants and they pull out of the process. Well, has it always been this hard or is it particularly hard now because of like the political situation we're in? It's always been hard. I mean, I think I've talked. to folks in and out of the agency, folks who used to lead the agency during the Obama era. And staffing has always been a struggle. One of the main reasons has been the lack of funding, right?

Just the lack of congressional funding to be able to streamline processes and offer things like these bonuses. So now, you know, the money is the first way to kind of fix some of the problem. You know, we saw other parts of the Department of Homeland Security do this during the, Biden administration thinking about agencies like customs and border protection. But, you know, the ability to boost ICE has always been difficult. I think the biggest issue, though, is the partisanship of a lot of a lot of immigration policy now. I mean, while a lot of immigration advocacy groups, you know, derisively referred to former President Obama as the, quote, deporter in chief, I don't think that they could have foreseen the way that the Trump administration is going

forth with some of their immigration policies that come off as far more ad hoc. And there's certainly no plan for a comprehensive immigration overhaul, which was a huge focus of the Obama administration, for example, wanting more immigration judges so that you could have due process, people with more ankle bracelets, for example, so that they were able to be found and be able to go to court, not arresting them at their court hearing when they tried to show up for court, you know, with, you know, agents that were in plain clothes, right? I mean, that's very different than what we'd seen in past administrations who did try to follow some degree of protocol.

And I think it's also, to Domenico's point, different administrations just naturally have different priorities. Yeah. But regardless of that, you know, during the Obama administration, Obama handed Trump one, about 19,000 people within ICE. And as I mentioned during the first half of this podcast, you know, it's been at 20,000 since then. You know, it just simply has not scaled up regardless of the administration's different priorities. During the Biden administration, the border was a much bigger priority. And there was a much bigger focus on bringing on border patrol agents and folks to man border security work at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process applications. But, you know, even with these varying priorities, the numbers just simply haven't changed since before Trump was president the first time. You know, I will say this is slightly surprising only because, you know, government jobs historically

have been seen as like pretty reliable. I'm kind of surprised that it is so hard for ice to fill these vacancies. Yeah, I mean, law enforcement generally has a difficult time because it's a dangerous job, right? And now a lot of these ICE agents have literal targets on their backs because as they're going into communities. You're seeing a lot of antipathy toward them. And that makes the job that much harder. I mean, knowing families of police officers, for example, their spouses are always very concerned whether or not their husband or wife is going to actually come home. And certainly if there was an increase in the kind of antipathy that we've seen toward ICE agents as we would toward police officers, there might be a harder time recruiting those folks. And you're right, though,

that generally public sector jobs have always been seen as a way to have long-term job security for yourself and for your family, a pension, other benefits, health care, all of those things. And, you know, what Trump has done in coming into office and targeting federal workers, whether it was through Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency or Doge or other efforts, there are a lot of people, not just in ICE, but, you know, even scientists and the like who are saying, I'm not sure if this is the job. that I want to have because it's not the safe, secure job that I thought it would be. I think there is a lot of questions amongst those that I've talked to and that I've seen on different threads online that, you know, they want to go for these jobs. But, you know, when enforcement is no longer the priority of the next administration, what happens? You know, do they just shift and work on paperwork or do, does this agency get gutted in the same way that we're seeing the current administration? you know, do layoffs of other swaths of the federal government. And not only that, but what if you speak out against some policy or what if you even go

through the proper protocols and tell your supervisor that you don't think something is ethical or legal or moral, you could find yourself on the way out of that job because you're seen as being anti-Trump. Well, Himana, and let's say ICE is able to meet that goal of hiring 10,000 people. I mean, do we have a sense of how quickly the agency will be able to turn around? and make good on Trump's mass deportation promises, which are pretty ambitious. So the Homeland Security Department has tracked that from the start of the administration to the end of May, there have been 185,000 deportations, which does not put the administration on track to deport one million people this year. And again, the timeline for hiring and fully training and vetting someone with their current standards is upwards of a year.

There's also many other logistical challenges to keep in mind. Domenico mentioned bed space and having space to detain someone, judges to process some of these deportations, the physical planes. You know, there's still a lot of other pieces that need to go into place for them to reach that, like, massive one million people a year goal. All right, well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Ashley Lopez. I'm Hamanabustio, and I cover immigration. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and, quote, And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation,

working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems. More information is at walton family foundation.org.