The ICE hiring boom

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In the last year, the Department of Homeland Security says 12,000 new agents and offices

have joined US immigration and customs enforcement or ICE.

This was an unprecedented hiring boom that more than doubled ICE's ranks.

The agency was aggressive in its recruitment efforts.

It waived age requirements and offered signing bonuses of up to $50,000.

The Department of Homeland Security says it's deploying agents to remove the quote

worst of the worst from the US.

This large ramp up has turned ICE into arguably one of the fastest growing and most

scrutinized workplaces in the country right now.

That's because its performance is highly visible and at times questionable.

The majority of immigrants caught up in this crackdown have no criminal convictions,

many have legal status and even US citizens have been taken into custody.

Recent surveys show an increasing number of Americans saying the immigration crackdown has gone

too far. Some politicians and community leaders are even calling for ICE to be dismantled.

Others say they need better training or a culture shift or both.

Are those changes needed and would they even make a difference?

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

I'm Whalen Wong, normally a co-host of Planet Money's Daily Podcast, the indicator.

And I'm Darien Woods.

Today on the show, the ICE hiring boom is having domino effects.

How has training new officers changed and at what cost?

Also, the Trump administration has plans to pour billions of dollars into warehouses

from mass immigrant detention centers, which can totally change the economy of some areas.

We hear from a rural town in Georgia that wants an ICE facility in its own backyard.

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The Trump administration's massive tax and spending law gave 750 million dollars

to something called the federal law enforcement training centers.

These are the facilities that train recruits for ICE,

U.S. Border Patrol, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Mark Brown taught at the main campus near Brunswick, Georgia for five years.

I enjoy training. I like when the light bulb goes off, so to speak.

The Georgia facility is so big that it hasn't its own zip code.

There are dorms, classrooms, and shooting ranges.

There's even a mini replica of a city spread out over more than 35 acres.

It has storefronts, shops, federal buildings,

and then you have neighborhoods behind it where you have houses,

you have duplexes, trailers, apartment style buildings.

Because when we would teach on crowd control, we would go over there.

We would use that city to show them, okay, this is how you're going to line up on the street.

So Mark, look at the trainees lined up on the street of this fake city.

And you would tell them, this is what you do if you're trying to arrest someone

and a crowd starts to form, or maybe there are protesters.

If they're protesting on the sidewalk,

they have to write a protestor presence.

So that's not something for you to engage in.

And then as soon as your person is handcuffed,

let's get them up and get them out of there.

Like, we don't need to stick around.

We don't talk to the crowd.

We're not actively going back and forth.

We're not here to debate their points.

They're allowed to protest our presence.

That's fine.

Our biggest thing is keeping everybody safe.

Mark says he's not seeing those protocols in some of the videos of federal agents that are

circulating.

And that makes them wonder about the training that the newly recruited

ISOCBP agents are getting or not getting.

So how much instruction do you new ice recruits get?

Well, there's been a lot of contradictory information on this,

including from the government.

Different officials within the DHS have said that the training for immigration agents

has been shortened.

At the same time, the agency says media outlets are spreading lies about ice training.

We reached out to DHS for clarification.

Spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin told us that officers are getting the same

number of training hours.

Here's what we were able to figure out based on the numbers we got from DHS.

New ice recruits get 14 weeks of training.

This is fewer weeks than what ice agents were previously getting.

It's also shorter than the national average for state and local law enforcement officers.

Matthew Ross is an economist at Northeastern University who studies police training.

He says he's concerned that the program for ice officers has changed significantly

in a short amount of time.

I think there's a lot of reasons to be quite worried about

what the long-term implications of that are going to look like.

And even what we're sort of seeing in places like Minneapolis,

it might be a direct result of that.

One major change in the ice training has to do with learning Spanish.

Previously, new ice agents got five weeks of Spanish instruction.

DHS spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin told us that the agency replaced those classes

with translation services covering multiple languages.

Is not clear what those services are.

Matthew says he's also concerned that ice recruits aren't getting enough high-quality

field training.

That's when new offices are paired with more experience ones to learn on the job.

Matthew and some other researchers studied field training using data from the Dallas Police

Department.

They found that if a recruit was assigned to a more aggressive field training officer,

that recruit was significantly more likely to use force.

The furthest we could look out just based on the data we had

was three years and from what it from as far as we can tell it,

if you happen to get paired up with a field training officer that used force frequently,

you were just more likely to use force for the entirety of that three-year period.

And in fact, it could be true that you just use force more for the rest of your career.

In other words, new law enforcement offices model their behavior after more experience ones.

And direction from senior offices, whether explicit or implicit, could be a bigger

influence on new recruits than their formal training.

That's according to Stiff Stoton.

He's a law professor at the University of South Carolina and a policing expert.

He's also a former police officer himself.

I would be shocked if some of what we see that's problematic in the way that ICE agents and CBP

agents are handling these various tasks.

I would be shocked if it's actually a training failure at this point.

Because some of the agents that have been publicly identified are long-standing veterans.

Case in point, a Minneapolis, US citizen Alex Prety appeared to be recording

agents on his cell phone as an observer.

The two agents who shot and killed him have been employed since 2014 and 2018,

according to ProPublica.

Doesn't matter how you're trained, if your supervisor says,

you run up to those cars and if they don't get out immediately, you break the windows.

Even if you are trained to not do that, even if you are trained

about why that's a really bad tactic, about why that's likely to provoke resistance,

about how that's likely to contribute to an otherwise avoidable use of force.

If that's what you're told to do by your supervisor,

and if that's what you think the peers around you expect you to do,

that's what you're going to do.

But Seth and economist Matthew Ross say the expect the administration to face multiple lawsuits

over how ICE and other federal agencies are conducting their immigration crackdown.

Seth doesn't believe that the possibility of costly future legal settlements

will motivate the administration to change its current tactics.

One of the things that we've seen from ICE at least and from CBP

is an approach to accountability that I think communicates to agents that it's just performative.

That really removes one of the legs from the stool that we use to get officers and

agents to perform as professionals.

The financial incentives alone probably aren't going to do anything,

especially not with an agency that just views that as the cost of doing business.

For her part, DHS spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin told us that ICE recruits get the same training

they always have. By the way, DHS confirmed to MPR last week that McLaughlin will be leaving the agency.

She's been the administration's public face in defending the mass deportation policy over the

last year. Earlier this week, a former ICE lawyer spoke at a forum held by congressional Democrats.

He said the agency's training program was, quote, deficient, defective, and broken.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal's office also released documents it said came from ICE

whistleblowers. The documents have here to show that new ICE recruits are getting 250

fewer hours of training than previous cohorts.

In a statement this week, DHS said again that ICE officers are getting the same amount of

training as before. After the break, we look at how ICE is planning to spend over 38 billion

dollars on detention centers. One world town in Georgia is trying to balance the economic benefits

with detention associated with an ICE facility in its own backyard.

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There are about 71,000 people in detention right now, which is a record high.

So at this point, you might be asking yourself, where are these increasing numbers of people

being held? To help me explain all of this, I'm joined by NPR Sergio Martinez Beltran.

He covers immigration. Welcome to the indicator, Sergio.

Hey, William. Thanks so much for the invite.

And you know, the short answer to that question you post is that the administration is building

and expanding huge detention centers across the country, many in small, economically depressed towns.

The Trump administration has dramatically changed how we as a country approach immigration

enforcement. Remember, there were millions of removals under President Obama,

but the majority of those removals were at the border. The Trump administration is going hard

on enforcement in the interior, picking people up in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago.

And we know Trump is ambitious. His administration has said it even wants to be able to carry out

even more detentions. The goal, Whalen, is to be able to retain about 93,000 immigrants all at the

same time. And DHS has a lot of money right now to follow through on these big ambitions.

Despite the shutdown over the agency's funding, it got a big chunk of change from the so-called

big beautiful bill. The administration plans to spend more than $38 billion of those funds to build

and expand its new detention facilities. They'll be located in big cities, but also in small towns.

And you reported on one of them in Georgia. Can you tell us about what you found?

Yes, so I want to take you to folks to Georgia. It's a rural community of close to 5,000 people,

mostly black, with about one-third of the population living under the poverty line.

It's also home to one of the largest ICE detention facilities in the U.S.

Glen Hall was the administrator of Charlton County, where folks in is, and he is very blunt about

what he thinks having the center could mean for his county. I won't put it in the words of

quid pro quo, but we are supporting a major federal policy with this administration.

And we need a hospital. We need emergency medical care. We need dollars. He told me that as a county

administrator, one of his jobs was to focus on jobs, you know, and creating them.

And this is an opportunity for that. What's now the ICE facility used to be a state prison,

but it closed. I mean, in 2017, the Geo Group started running an immigration detention center out

of it. That's the private prison corporation, also in charge of the expansion of the facility,

that's happening now with the new dollars. Now, this sounds like a story we've heard before.

A small town that has no industries gets a lifeline in the form of a prison or an immigration

detention center. Right. And now you drive by the ICE detention center in folks turn, and it's

at least three CD blocks, shiny barbed wire surrounds the whole area, and the parking lot is

full of employee cars. Obviously, you can see the economic development that it has here, the

impact that it has on our community with all those jobs, and potentially more.

Up until last year, the facility used to have 1100 beds, but it's been expanded to hold up to

3,000 people so far. This has brought about 200 new jobs of an hourly rate ranging from around

$18 to about $50 with higher rates for physicians and dentists.

The expansion of the facility is also giving the local county and the city of

folks done about a million dollars. This doesn't sound like a lot of money, especially after you

compare it to the $96 million contract that Geo Group has with the Feds. But for this area,

that's a lifeline. I hate to say it, but if it's not here, it's somewhere else.

So you take advantage of the stuff that you have at your table, and I hate to simplify

that because these are people's lives and families, but that's the reality of it.

When I visited folks done late last year, Glenn actually drove me and a producer around the ice

facility, and as we were down a side road by eight, a group of the tenies were outside in a

recreational area, and they got close to the fence and started shouting at us.

One of the men yelled, help, they ain't treating us good out here. I asked Glenn what he thought

about hearing the men shouting these at us. If I was detained behind barbed wire like that,

I would be only helped to, to somebody coming down a dirt road. No doubt. That's the humanity

side of this, right? He is clearly conflicted, and many residents in the community are conflicted

too. Right, and it's interesting, Glenn, because for many residents, the detention center

has been a place that could help them earn some money. That's what folks from Native Savannah

have told me. I know for several of us, we just see it as just like a place that you could always

get a job, and that's really what it has been treated as. It kind of, if you didn't pursue

college, and if you didn't go into a trade area or you're waiting or whatever, the prison was

always an option at that time. Of course, my prison, she's talking about the detention center,

and she says there's one big thing that attracts people to apply to work there.

It offers benefits. Sometimes benefits are better than making money. Sometimes knowing that you

have insurance and knowing that your kids have insurance at your house, and that's one of the things

that the GEO group offered to people here was this promise of good benefits and of a decent wage,

which a lot of people thought was a really good thing. It gave them a leverage. At least that

they didn't want to stay out there for long. They got them enough in their pocket to go somewhere

else. Still, Savannah is very much against this detention center. In fact, she's been advocating for

it to shut down. Morally, I don't think we should ever be tied to a system that hurts black and brown

bodies. And not just that, a system that puts on a fake, fake aid of criminality. These individuals

haven't committed a crime. Savannah is studying medicine at Mercer University about two hours north of

Folkston, but all her family still lives in Folkston. She says sometimes she feels like she's in

the minority here because she says having the time to think about the morality of it all is a luxury.

When you're in a poverty level, we're just thinking about how can I get money in my pocket?

And that's where they bring up this, you know, we just don't have jobs conversation. But

I say that this is just something you don't want to build your future upon, something that changes

every four years. She's talking about how immigration policy changes with each new president.

So the center might shut down with a new administration. And that's something local leaders like

Glen Hall understand. Glen no longer works for Charlton County, but when I spoke to him late

last year, he agreed that the county should not rely on the detention center in the long term.

I'm hopeful that the prison will work itself out of a job. If this is, if this is the truth,

that we close our borders and deport all the illegal immigrants. But that would be less jobs for the

county. Absolutely would be. As of now, the Trump administration needs Folkston as well as the

other communities saying yes to having an ICE facility in their backyard up to 24 new facilities

are being planned.

Sergio, thank you so much for bringing us the story today. You're welcome. Thanks for inviting me.

If you learned something from this episode, please send it to a friend who would get

something out of it too. Word of mouth is how we grow. So spreading the word is supporting our

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Meanwhile, Kenny and Sarah and Nick are on the West Coast. Each stop has storytelling, special

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planetmoneybook.com. The episodes of the indicator were produced by Julia Richie with engineering

by Jimmy Kiwi. They're a fact-checked by Sarah Huatis, kicking cannon is our show's editor.

This episode of Planet Money was produced by Luis Gaio with help from James Sneed,

is edited by Planet Money's executive producer Alex Goldmark. I'm Whalen Wong. This is MPR. Thanks for

listening.

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