This is transcript of WUWM's Status Pending podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Jimmy Gutierrez: In our last episode, we traced the origins and evolution of ICE — the agency, the ideology and how it was supported across parties. Now, we’re looking at who’s doing the work.
As of July, there were close to 30,000 employees at the agency. That’s about the same as Bed, Bath and Beyond or Dick’s Sporting Goods. But for ICE, this is just the start. The goal for ICE is to hire another 5,000 employees and deportation officers by the end of the year.
You might be thinking: it seems like things could be missed, when trying to hire so many people in so little time. And if history is a teacher, you’d be right.
ICE was in the same position last year, launching a massive hiring campaign and bringing on over 8,000 employees and agents. And according to the New York Times, within a matter of months, hundreds of those hires were removed from the job.
The problem is that these hiring campaigns happen so quickly and are so opaque that the public doesn’t really know what’s going on. So, today, we’re pulling the curtain back and finding out who’s in our streets, behind the mask.
This is Status Pending, I’m Jimmy Gutierrez. This is our second episode looking into ICE, the enforcement arm of DHS. The agency that wants to hire 5,000 people in a matter of months. The same one where 7,500 people are still waiting on extensive background checks.
Today, we’re going to find out who ICE is hiring, and how those people are being trained. And then, we’re going to talk to someone who applied to become an agent, and couldn’t believe how flawed the process was.
Associated Press reporter shares findings on ICE hiring practices
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ryan Foley: It is pretty remarkable that they hired something like 12,000 officers in less than a year. And they said they had, you know, 220,000 applications. So they were moving very quickly. Obviously, there were some gaps.
My name is Ryan J. Foley. I'm a national news reporter for the Associated Press, and I've been covering ICE for the last year.
Jimmy Gutierrez: 12,000 people. 220,000 applicants. I mean, those numbers are just hard to really understand, you know? We're talking, like, small to medium U.S. cities here, as far as the number of applicants. What kind of people are they hiring then? What makes up this 12,000?
RF: A majority of the new hires do have experience either in the military, law enforcement or both. I think a story that has gone a little bit untold is that a number of federal police officers who worked for other agencies jumped at the chance to transfer to ICE, in part because of the signing bonus.
Police officers who worked as security guards at, say, VA hospitals, for the Federal Reserve, for the Army. A number of federal police officers were hired. And then you saw this: the ICE officer who was involved in a shooting in Maine, I believe his name was David Brouillette. He had been a VA police officer as well. So there are a lot of local police officers, a lot of people that had been in the military and were working in private security jobs and just other people that were drawn to the mission of ICE that was advertised. And [people were] recruited who believed in the mission of, you know, what President Trump was laying out.
JG: You'd brought up the signing bonus. And we were just looking here at the station, as far as the base salary – which for an entry-level agent was like $50,000. Which, depending on if you're in corrections or if you're a police officer, like, obviously the salaries can vary by tens of thousands of dollars. Is that a competitive enough salary? And I know the signing bonus is kicked in here. But I would imagine there's some stipulations with receiving that bonus.
RF: Just to step back, I mean, I think the ads were effective as part of this recruiting campaign. But the signing bonus was also just a huge factor. I mean, people were leaping at the idea of getting $50,000 upfront for a whole host of reasons, obviously. But that's why we did find that a number of newly-hired applicants had a history of financial problems and were currently in debt. Sometimes those can be red flags for hiring in federal law enforcement. But, you know, those were the type of people that, $50,000 signing bonus was very enticing.
JG: So you talked about the people with either criminal justice backgrounds or military backgrounds that are drawn to this kind of work. You know, I'm going to point people to your reporting and investigation because you did an incredible job of pulling the mask back about who these people are, which has been so secretive. And it's just felt like something that we haven't had access to as a public — who are on our streets, masked up with it seems like pretty much carte blanche authority?
And when we're talking about the people that we're talking about right now, I think Andrew Penland’s story jumps out to me. He was 29. He joined ICE after resigning, or maybe being forced to resign, late last year. And he was a sheriff's deputy in Kansas. So what do we know about Andrew and how his story informs who ICE is hiring?
RF: He is someone who did have some issues in his background. So he had worked in Bourbon County, Kansas, and he faced a lawsuit there from a woman who alleged that he falsely arrested her and then lied in a report about what happened, in order to justify this woman's arrest. Ultimately, the county paid $75,000.
This woman, her name was June Bench. She was trying to get Penland out of law enforcement. So she had shown up at some county meetings. And around that time, he left the county for another job in Kansas, and he was working as a deputy in another county when he was hired by ICE. So this woman, you know, June Bench, she says it's frightening that he now has more power, when this is someone she was trying to get removed from law enforcement for what she called an abuse of power.
JG: I mean, that feels like it speaks to the host of people that you kind of profiled here and the officer in Maine, you know? And this is a question I think a lot of people have had, looking at bringing on 12,000 people. What does training look like for bringing in this number of people to have this kind of authority on our streets? What does training look like and what have we heard?
RF: You know, there was a whistleblower who came forward who was a longtime ICE lawyer and an instructor who taught use of force, and the legality surrounding it, at ICE's academy in Georgia. And he alleged that training had been slashed, the length of the academy had been shortened dramatically, and they weren't spending as much time on, particularly, use of force issues and use of force training as they had previously.
Now, ICE has pushed back against his account. But the new DHS secretary, Mark Wayne Mullen, did tell Congress that as of this summer, they have started to add back some training requirements and lengthen the time at the academy.
My understanding also is that, for people that had already graduated from police academies – and that's a lot of the new hires – that many of them qualified for even shorter online training, which many of them could do from their homes in a matter of weeks, I believe. So training has been an issue. And they've faced criticism, even from others in law enforcement, for rushing the training.
JG: Someone that you talked to was Marshall Jones. And Marshall’s over at the Florida Institute of Technology, and he is an expert on police hiring. What did he have to say about your findings?
RF: Yeah, he was an expert at Florida Institute of Technology that I spoke to. And he said it's important that we keep following the story, for one, because we need more data on who the new officers are and how many of them are sticking with the force, versus washing out pretty quickly, and what the fail rate is at the academy, etc. And that's all data we're trying to get our hands on to this day.
And he says that'll all give us a better idea of the effectiveness of this hiring campaign. But he said, when you go this fast, there's just no question: you're going to hire some less-than-ideal candidates that – when you weren't trying to hire 12,000 people or add thousands of bodies on the streets as quickly, people that may have met the minimum standards, they weren't ideal candidates, so they wouldn't have been hired in the past. Here it was, “Well, they meet the minimum standards, and we need people. So we're going to hire them.”
JG: So his note is that this report came out in the spring, late spring. And this was the public’s first big peek, I would say, into how these hiring practices are working, and giving some context. What has DHS said about your reporting, and specifically who they're hiring and their hiring practices?
RF: It's hard to investigate, because unlike state and local agencies, you can't find out who they're hiring. Local police, state police, you can pretty easily get a roster of who they are. And then you can check out their backgrounds as you wish. The federal government does not release the identities, generally, of its employees. And what we've seen from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE is they don't typically even release the names of officers who are involved in fatal shootings that we've seen, or other serious incidents. They say that it's a privacy concern – that if they release their identities, they and their families face threats and other retaliation for their work.
In the big picture, I think ICE is acknowledging that there have been some mistakes. And the new leaders have made some changes, partly under pressure from Congress. They're going to start wearing body cameras. They've made some changes to the academy and how that works. And they've acknowledged that, like in the Maine case, there was a failure in vetting and that they're going to look into that.
At the same time, I think they are proud of how quickly they've expanded, and they defend the backgrounds of their officers, generally, as military and police veterans, largely, who want to carry out President Donald Trump's mission to arrest and deport people who are here illegally.
Journalist shares ICE application experience
Jimmy Gutierrez: Earlier this year, there was a story that came out. It was first person, from the perspective of a woman applying to join ICE. She wanted to know more about ICE as an organization, and who was carrying out their mandate.
Laura Jedeed: If you've heard of me, it may be because I published an article in Slate earlier this year about getting hired by ICE, despite having a very unique name and being unsympathetic to the organization.
JG: This is journalist Laura Jedeed. She wrote “You’ve Heard About Who ICE is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JG: Could we just go back to when you were at ICE's Career Expo? It sounds like it was in the Dallas, Fort Worth area. And paint a picture of what you remember and who you were there with.
LJ: I guess about a year ago was August of ‘25. ICE was having a hiring expo in the Esports arena in Arlington, Texas. So it was this kind of futuristic, Tron-looking place. Very large, with a great deal of folding chairs, meant to accommodate a lot more people than actually showed up. I don't think there were more than like 150 people there at any point while I was there. We all had to sign up for slots to come in. But, it wasn't necessary. There was no line to get in. There was no line through security. And the only line I stood in was the line to basically get assigned to a person to talk to. There was like eight people in front of me before talking to, you know, a hiring manager who basically asked me some HR questions that could easily have been a form – just the most basic demographic information you can imagine.
JG: Do you think you were qualified for this gig? Tell me about your resumé and what may have made you a stellar, or less than stellar, applicant.
LJ: So, the plan was to get in the door with a resumé that looked pretty plausible. And I think that at first glance, I don't look like a terrible candidate. I was in the military. I deployed to Afghanistan twice. I was in the 82nd Airborne Division. And then I worked as an analyst in the private sector for quite some time. And so I did a skills-based resume. And I just kind of elided the last decade or so of my life. At first glance, I look OK.
I also have a very unique name, which matters for two reasons. One of which is that I have a pretty strong internet presence. My social media presence is large. I am the only Laura Jedeed in the world. If you type my name into Google, it will become immediately apparent how I feel about ICE. I am not shy about my condemnation of it, of the Trump administration, of all of that. And when this article came out, there were a bunch of people online who were like, “Oh, you're mad at them because they hired a liberal.” It's like, well, if I applied for McDonald's, and the manager got online and searched me and was like, “Oh, this person has a social media account devoted to bashing McDonald's,” I don't think they would hire me. I just think that's common sense.
But more importantly than that, the name Jedeed is Syrian. My father immigrated here in the ‘70s. When I was in the military, I had a top-secret security clearance. And it took me about eight months longer to get that clearance than any of my cohort. And frankly, that was correct. You know, the Jedeed family is a political one. One would want to be careful about making sure that someone with that last name wasn't some kind of foreign agent or compromised. And so, those two things should have raised some red flags, different red flags, but certainly prompted a closer look.
JG: Right. So that closer look didn't happen, which we were getting to. But what happens first is that you have this interview, which lasts for six minutes. What was asked of you in this six-minute interview?
LJ: So there were no questions that couldn't have been filled out on a form. It was a bunch of demographic information. They wanted to be sure I was under 40. I'm trying not to be too insulted about that. And they wanted to know where I would like to be stationed, confirming that I had military experience. It was the most simple demographic info you can imagine. I had prepared a true statement about the 10 years I left off of my resume – things where it wasn't the whole truth, but nothing that was a lie.
And at one point, unprompted, I kind of launched into it. And you would just not believe how uninterested this woman was in anything I was saying. Like, this was not what she was there for. She was there to fill out a form, put my resume underneath in and then tell me that I would get a call back shortly.
JG: Just keep it moving?
LJ: Yep.
JG: A few days later, an email comes to you, which you did not see until a few days later. Tell me what this email says, and then walk me through the process of what happens next with your journey of becoming an ICE officer.
LJ: All of this was pieced together about a month after it happened, because I did miss this email. They told me, “Keep an eye on your email for a couple days; we'll probably get back to you.” And when they didn't, I mistakenly assumed, “Oh, they Googled me one time, so this is over. I'll get started on writing my piece.”
What actually happened is: about five days later, they sent me an email telling me that I had advanced to the next step of the application. And they sent me a packet of paperwork to fill out and to sign – things like an affidavit that I didn't have a domestic violence conviction of any kind, basic permission to start a security background check, all the things that you would expect. And the email, in no uncertain terms, said: “if we do not hear back from you within,” I think it was, 48 hours, possibly 72 hours, "then we're going to assume you're not interested. Have a nice day. The end.” And I didn't see it, so I didn't fill out any of that paperwork.
A week later, they emailed again, reminding me that I needed to fill out this paperwork. I didn't see that email either. My inbox is a mess, but that's neither here nor there. So that really should have been the end of it, except then, a couple weeks later, I received an email from LabCorp telling me that, as part of my hiring process, I needed to take a drug test. That was a surprise to me, and also a little bit concerning, because I live in New York City. Cannabis is legal here, and I had partaken about six days earlier. And I'm like, “Well, I'm going to fail this drug test. But sure, I'll waste some of ICE's money. Why not?” So I went down, did the thing, came back, and at this point I am expecting to hear back because, when you fail a drug test, they do have to tell you.
And so I'm waiting for that email, and I'm waiting for that email. And finally, a friend's like, “Did you consider just logging on to the job portal and seeing how your application is doing?” And I was like, “Oh, I actually hadn't. That's a really good idea.” So I did. I logged on to the hiring portal and what I found: it said that I had gone through the process. I had received and accepted a final offer, and that I was now in the onboarding process. As of Sept. 30 I was, according to this portal, an ICE officer.
So I clicked through, because I hadn't done any of the onboarding tasks. So, according to this portal, my physical fitness test had been initiated three days after I was looking at it. My drug screening was done. My medical screening was completed three days in the future. I was checking on Oct. 3. It said, “Date completed Oct. 6,” and most worrying of all, “Background investigation completed Oct. 6.” So, according to this ICE portal, I had completed a background check, which I never signed any paperwork for and which would have raised red flags had they done one – allegedly completed three days in the future, which is nuts.
JG: So you go through this. Your piece comes out in Slate. You tweet about it, which, if DHS will see anything, they will see a tweet. They retweeted and basically called you a liar: “this is a lazy lie.” “This individual was never offered a job at ICE,” they say. And then they go on, and there's this big back-and-forth. What did DHS have to say, and what do you make of their response?
LJ: Right. After the post started getting traction with the original article, the DHS did respond. And it's the only time they've ever responded to this, so far as I know. They said, “It's a lazy lie; she received a tentative offer; lots of people receive tentative offers; it means nothing.” And when you know that the government is going to be coming for you, it's always good to have something in reserve. So I hadn't yet posted the video, the screen capture of the ICE portal as I saw it. So I just quote-tweeted them and said, “You sure about that?” and posted the video.
And again, people can make it what they want. I've said before, like, if somebody looks at this and sees something that I've missed that makes this anything but just an absolute travesty, I'd like to know. Like, I don't want to live in a world where the government is handing out guns and shock gloves and “absolute immunity” to anybody who signs up to do the job. I don't want to live in that world, but it's pretty clear that we do.
And they never responded after that. I've heard nothing further from them – which, I mean this government can be very vindictive, and I was braced for impact. But nothing happened. I think they just waited for the news cycle to move on, and unfortunately that's what happened. I mean, the whole thing about flooding the zone is: you can have things like this happen, and two weeks later something horrible will happen, and it'll get driven out of the headlines, and they can wait it out. And I think that's what they did.
