ICE’s hiring spree led to influx of recruits with questionable qualifications, investigation shows | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
An investigation found that rapid hiring and expansion by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) led to an influx of employees with questionable qualifications.
The track record of some of the new hires under the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda stands out — and not in a good way.
These include two bankruptcies and six law enforcement stints in three years, an allegation that he lied on a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman (an incident that led to a $75,000 settlement and criticism of the recruit’s integrity), and a job candidate who once failed to graduate from the police academy, then only managed to work his only job as a police officer for three weeks.
The common thread is that it was recently hired by ICE during an unprecedented hiring spree — 12,000 new officers and special agents to double its force — after the agency received a $75 billion windfall from Congress to implement Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
The US president emphasized rapid action, and for ICE, that meant rapid recruitment and hiring; This led to the emergence of new employees with questionable qualifications. Following several high-profile incidents in which ICE agents used excessive force, their backgrounds and training have come under scrutiny.
“If the review is not done well and it is done too quickly, you run the risk of increased liability to the agency for bad actions, abuse of power, and failure to perform the task properly because people don’t know what they are doing,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, who served as an ICE official during the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations.
Most of the new hires are police and military veterans, the agency said. But mounting evidence shows that applicants with questionable backgrounds are either not fully vetted before being hired or are hired despite their backgrounds, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.
ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, who will resign at the end of May, said at a congressional hearing in February that he was proud of the recruitment campaign, which received more than 220,000 applications. “This expansion of a well-trained and well-supervised workforce will help further enhance ICE’s ability to carry out the president and secretary’s bold agenda,” he said.
Unlike many local law enforcement agencies, ICE has said it protects employees’ identities to protect them from harassment, making it impossible to fully account for new hires.
The AP focused on more than 40 officers who recently publicly announced their new jobs as ICE officers on their LinkedIn pages and used public records to conduct background checks. All but one were men.
Although many have traditional qualifications such as former corrections officers, security guards, veterans and police officers, it is unclear how many should potentially be disqualified because the AP does not have access to all personnel files. But the AP found that many of those men had a history of unpaid debts that resulted in legal action, two had filed for bankruptcy, and three others faced lawsuits alleging misconduct in previous law enforcement roles.
Marshall Jones, an expert on police recruitment at the Florida Institute of Technology, said it’s difficult to get a full picture of ICE’s new employee pool without more data. But he said ICE likely hired some “less-than-ideal candidates” who met minimum requirements but would be overlooked in the normal hiring cycle.
“If you’re hiring hundreds or thousands of people, there will be outliers, even with the best back-end processes,” he said. “The question is, are these normal outliers from people doing something, or is there a systematic difficulty in vetting people appropriately in case there are problems?”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE’s parent agency, did not respond to questions about specific hiring decisions. But he acknowledged that some applicants were given “provisional selection letters” and offers to begin working on a provisional status before being subjected to full background checks.
“ICE is committed to ensuring that law enforcement personnel are held to the highest standards and rigorously screens them throughout the hiring process,” the department said. “The review is not a one-time event but an ongoing process.”
The process involves reviewing criminal histories and credit scores and conducting background investigations, which can take weeks, including interviews with previous employers and other employees. But the hiring influx put the agency, which promised signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and advertised that a college degree was not required, into trouble.
In an internal memo first reported by Reuters in February, ICE managers were told that if they received “derogatory information about the behavior of a newly hired employee,” they should refer the allegations to an internal affairs unit for investigation. Such information could include termination or forced resignation of employees, the memo said.
The new hires include Carmine Gurliacci, 46, who resigned as a police officer in Richmond Hill, Georgia, in December to join ICE in Atlanta, according to a resignation letter obtained by the AP.
He filed for bankruptcy in 2022, saying he had no income and had been unemployed for two years after moving from New York to Georgia, according to court filings. He said he lived with a friend and did chores in exchange for housing, listing tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid loans, bills, child support and other debts. He also filed for bankruptcy in New York in 2013, listing debts of $95,000, records show.
Trickler-McNulty said serious financial problems are “a pretty big red flag” because they can make employees susceptible to bribes or extortions, which are also problems at ICE.
After his bankruptcy petition was approved in 2022, Gurliacci rejoined the workforce by moving on to six law enforcement agencies in Georgia over three years, resigning each time before moving on, according to records obtained by the AP.
Reached by phone, Gurliacci told a reporter he would call back. He never responded and did not respond to follow-up messages.
Another new hire is Andrew Penland, 29, who joined ICE after resigning as a deputy sheriff in Greenwood County, Kansas, in December.
Penland spent most of his career as a deputy in Bourbon County, Kansas, but left last year after facing a lawsuit in 2022 for allegedly arresting a woman on false allegations. Under the agreement, the district’s insurer paid $75,000 to settle the case.
After being reached for comment, Penland deactivated his LinkedIn account and alerted ICE to investigate but did not respond to the AP.
ICE’s third new hire, Antonio Barrett, failed to graduate from the Colorado law enforcement academy in 2020, according to an email obtained by the AP; He is one of two students who “did not complete some parts of the academy” and received an “incomplete grade”.
After a community college arranged for a day of special training and testing for him, he finished the program and took a job with the police department in La Junta, Colorado, in July 2020. But he only worked for three weeks before resigning and never worked for the local police force again. Barrett previously worked as a corrections officer at a prison in Colorado.
He and another colleague were accused of using excessive force for causing pain to a handcuffed prisoner in 2017. But state officials argued that their actions were not excessive, and the court agreed, dismissing the case. Barrett did not respond to a message seeking comment.
ICE has denied removing any training requirements, saying new hires receive 56 days of training and 28 days of on-the-job training. The agency said most new officers have already completed programs at law enforcement academies.
But former ICE academy instructor Ryan Schwank testified in February that agency leaders cut training on use of force, firearm safety and protesters’ rights. He said the new hires included some who were 18 years old, did not have a college degree, and were not native English speakers.
“We don’t train them to know when they’re being asked to do something they shouldn’t be doing, something illegal or wrong,” he said.
