Immigration and Customs Enforcement has placed
new recruits into its training program before they have completed the agency’s vetting process, an unusual sequence of events as the agency rushes to hire federal
immigration officers to carry out
President Donald Trump’s
mass deportation policy, one current and two former Homeland Security Department officials told NBC News.
ICE officials only later discovered that some of these recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said.
Staff at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found as recently as this month that some recruits going through the six-week training course had not submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said.
Per ICE policy, applicants are required to pass a drug test and undergo a security vetting through ICE’s human resources office prior to showing up for the training course. The former officials said that process was more strictly adhered to before a hiring surge that began this summer. That process was meant to weed out disqualified candidates before they would be sent to training.
Since the surge began, the agency has dismissed more than 200 new recruits while in training for falling short of its hiring requirements, according to recently collected internal ICE data reviewed by NBC News.
The majority of them failed to meet ICE’s physical or academic standards, according to the data. Just under 10 recruits were dismissed for criminal charges, failing to pass drug tests or safety concerns that should have been flagged in a background check prior to arriving at training, the data indicated and the current and former DHS officials confirmed.
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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. 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.
