The Worst ICE Agents Are Coming

FOR ALL THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S TALK of saving money and increasing “government efficiency,” the president demanded that huge amounts be appropriated in the Republicans’ recent budget bill to fund his mass-deportation program. In all, $170 billion was set aside to be spent over the next four years for border and immigration enforcement. This total includes $45 billion to create a sprawling detention system (nearly five times the annual budget for the Bureau of Prisons), $30 billion for ICE operations, $46.6 billion for more border wall construction, and, as if that weren’t enough, a new $10 billion border patrol slush fund.

This level of funding is unprecedented. ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country. And that fact raises a question: What exactly are they going to do with all that money?

The Trump administration now has the budget to make its wildest fantasies of mass deportation come true, regardless of whether Americans even want it. (They increasingly don’t.) That will mean more legal and human rights abuses and more facilities built. The Everglades detention center may have a stupid name that thrills Republican fans, but the treatment of detainees there is no joke, and neither is the fact that the administration plans to stand up similar facilities in other friendly states.

But the next terror won’t arrive in the form of concrete and barbed wire. It’s the people who are going to be recruited to staff the new camps. To keep pace with the administration’s unquenchable thirst for arrests, deportations, and cruelty, ICE is using its billions of new dollars to go on a hiring spree—and, to borrow a phrase, they’re unlikely to send their best.

Trump wants to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, the equivalent of roughly 50 percent of the current total manpower of the agency, along with 3,000 new border patrol agents. And he wants to do it fast, the better to help reach Stephen Miller’s arbitrary and increasingly unrealistic goal of one million deportations in 2025.

Experts warn that whenever the priority becomes hiring law enforcement agents quickly, standards immediately collapse and misconduct follows. This is a lesson the George W. Bush administration learned as it raced to expand Customs and Border Protection.

The collapse in standards happens in two ways when the government rushes to fill law enforcement jobs—and both could dramatically worsen the already troubling mass-deportation campaign. The first ...