During the second presidency of Donald Trump, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) significantly increased recruiting efforts.[1] They are attempting to hire 10,000 new employees in 2026, up from 20,000 employees in December 2025,[1] and have allocated $100 million in one year for what they have referred to as a "wartime recruitment" campaign.[2]
ICE is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, that was formed to uphold the mission of "[p]rotecting America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety".[6] The organization was created after the September 11, 2001 attacks as part of a major government reorganization, along with the Department of Homeland Security, US Customs and Border Protection, and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.[6][7]
One of Donald Trump's second term campaign promises as was to crack down on illegal immigration and as president of the United States, his administration has pursued a deportation policy generally described as "maximalist", and as a "mass deportation" campaign, involving the detention, confinement, and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of suspected illegal immigrants and their family members. Trump also signed several executive orders related to immigration such as declaring a national emergency at the US-Mexico border, ending the process of "catch and release" for illegal immigrants and suspending all refugee admissions to the US.[8][9] On January 23, 2025, ICE began to carry out raids on sanctuary cities, and the Trump administration reversed the policy of the Biden administration to give ICE permission to raid schools, hospitals and places of worship.[10][11] By January 2026, politicians, journalists, and scholars have increasingly called ICE a paramilitary force.[12]
Recruitment
DHS announced in the summer of 2025, their intent to recruit and hire more then 10,000 deportation officers, using a "wartime recruitment" tactic according to internal memos. ICE officials allocated about $100 million over one year to recruit new agents.[13]
Sarah Saldaña, the former director of ICE during the Obama administration, said that ICE used to fill open positions primarily through local police departments and sheriff's offices, but now they are hiring untrained recruits eager for combat. She said the mentality of trying to recruit as many agents as possible "tends to inculcate in people a certain aggressiveness that may not be necessary in 85 percent of what you do."[2]
Training
Newly hired ICE law enforcement personnel receive their training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia. Prior to 2025, ERO Officer trainees had to complete the basic 13-week ERO academy.[14] In 2025, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) training was cut in half to run eight weeks, with training six days a week, Spanish-language courses were eliminated and academy training reduced to 47 days allegedly owing to Trump being the 47th president.[15] In January 2026, The Intercept reported on a hiring binge with "shorter training, looser requirements, and flashy bonuses", leading to evidence of incompetence on display, as in humiliating "videos of agents falling down and dropping their guns" going viral on social media.[16]
Slate journalist Laura Jedeed applied to ICE in order to learn about their application process.[17] Jedeed reported that her interview took six minutes, stating that they only asked basic questions like her name, date of birth, whether she had military or law enforcement experience, and her reasons for leaving the armed forces.[17] She wrote that the recruiter told her "the goal is to put as many guns and badges out in the field as possible."[17] Jedeed remarked that she then received a "tentative offer" instructing her to fill out follow-up forms, which she ignored, and then she took a drug test shortly after using cannabis.[17] According to the journalist, ICE subsequently formally offered her a job, which she turned down.[17]
White nationalism allegations
Manifest Destiny painting used in ICE recruitment ad with the slogan "A Heritage to Be Proud Of, a Homeland Worth Defending"
The agency's aggressive and meme-heavy publicity campaign was run by political appointees in their 20s, and received criticism from political commentators and scholars for being unprofessional and intentionally cruel.[18][19] The campaign noticeably re-used WWII-era US propaganda posters, several of which had text that suggested the goal of deportations was to protect American culture, and several of which were accused of promoting white nationalism by scholars and historians or were previously promoted by far-right accounts.[20] The Southern Poverty Law Center found the DHS using "white nationalist and anti-immigrant images and slogans in recruitment materials" for ICE and that some "images and language appear to come directly from antisemitic and neo-Nazi publications and a white Christian nationalist website".[21]
One ad shared by the White House featured a song produced and popularized by white nationalist group the Pine Tree Riots. The ad was captioned "We'll Have Our Home Again" which was the name of the song, with "join.ice.gov" written below.[3][4][5]
Two other ads were released, one for ICE recruitment captioned "Which way, American man?", and the other captioned "Which way, Greenland man?", which referred to the Greenland Crisis. A connection was drawn by NBC news to Which Way Western Man?, a book used by white nationalist groups that praises Adolf Hitler.[5][22][23]
Another used the slogan "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage." One Rutgers University professor drew a parallel with the Nazi slogan "One people, one realm, one leader."[5][24]
When asked about one of the slogans by Politico, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson accused Politico of being a "deranged leftist who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda."[23]
Additional controversies
Some ICE recruitment videos used musicians' songs against their will. ICE has also used AI-generated images for recruitment. In one ad targeting police officers, they attacked sanctuary cities: "You took an oath to protect and serve, to keep your family—your city—safe. But in sanctuary cities, you're ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals walk free."[1]
Approximately 15,000 federal law enforcement workers have been reassigned to work on immigration enforcement, as have state police and other state-level officials, making for 25,320 government officials total.[25]
In January 2026, Spotify confirmed ICE ads are no longer running on their platform after the government advertising campaign ended.[28] Later that month, the advocacy group Indivisible sent a public letter to Spotify's new CEOs calling on the company to pledge to stop running ICE ads going forward.[26]
12345Brickner-Wood, Brady (January 7, 2026). "ICE's New-Age Propaganda". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on January 7, 2026. Retrieved January 15, 2026.
12"Mission". U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. U.S. Department of Homeland Security. August 19, 2020. Archived from the original on July 29, 2025.
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