Filed
12:00 p.m. EDT
10.18.2025
The company’s aggressive recruiting, together with a $50,000 signing bonus, is hurting staffing in native businesses.
Individuals line as much as converse with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruiters throughout a hiring occasion in Provo, Utah, in September 2025.
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“Are you able to defend the homeland?”
“AMERICA NEEDS YOU.”
These are among the newest appeals in a months-long, multi-million-dollar recruitment marketing campaign by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to rent hundreds of latest brokers and assist workers to speed up deportations nationwide.
As of September, the blitz appeared to be working — the company reported some 150,000 purposes from potential brokers. Some new recruits are latest faculty grads. Others wish to change careers. However one group of individuals has emerged as each controversial and essentially the most coveted potential new ICE brokers: legislation enforcement officers already working for metropolis and state businesses.
A number of police chiefs and sheriffs have accused the federal company of attempting to poach their officers after ICE officers emailed them providing money incentives to go away their jobs in locations like Florida and New Hampshire.
A few of the emails from ICE look like particularly concentrating on folks from businesses which have already agreed to deputize officers as part-time federal brokers to assist discover and detain undocumented immigrants.
“Somebody in Washington must lose their jobs over this, as a result of that is ridiculous,” Florida’s Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey mentioned in August of the recruiting emails, which got here lower than two months after Ivey vowed to shoot folks ”graveyard useless” in protection of ICE officers.
Different Florida Sheriffs, together with Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood, shared comparable sentiments with reporters over the summer season, stating that ICE officers used the information the sheriffs had freely shared to focus on their officers.
The federal authorities can be concentrating on recruits from police forces in so-called sanctuary cities. In Atlanta, the feds spent almost $1 million in a single week on an promoting marketing campaign designed to lure native legislation enforcement away from departments the place ICE says the officers are “ordered to face down whereas harmful illegals” roam free.
The federal blitz is making it tougher for native and state police businesses to recruit and retain sworn officers, an issue that has plagued legislation enforcement since earlier than the COVID pandemic. Three years in the past, my then-colleague Weihua Li and I chronicled how the continued exodus from policing was a part of an general development of individuals dropping authorities jobs for entrepreneurship or extra profitable jobs within the personal sector.
Police chiefs and sheriffs informed us that they have been attempting all the pieces they may to get and preserve good officers, together with providing money incentives, reducing coaching and schooling necessities, dropping age restrictions and even pushing to loosen up citizenship necessities in some locations. Since then, different legislation enforcement leaders have referred to as recruitment and retention crucial problem dealing with the occupation other than violent crime.
Now they face stiff competitors from ICE recruiters, who can dangle extra perks than most metropolis and state businesses ever might — together with affords of as much as $50,000 in signing bonuses, one other $60,000 in tuition reimbursement and an additional 25% premium pay for some particular agent roles.
However the marketing campaign doesn’t look like working in all places. Simply this week, the San Francisco Police Division reported its greatest recruitment surge prior to now 5 years. And in Oakland, legislation enforcement leaders teamed up with the NAACP of their push to switch the six officers, on common, that they’re shedding each month to retirement and different departures. It’s a tactic unlikely to see a parallel in federal businesses like ICE, which operates below a Division of Justice that has overtly discarded variety initiatives below the Trump administration.
The guarantees that ICE is utilizing to draw candidates aren’t universally interesting, both. An officer in San Diego informed the Washington Examiner that ICE’s monetary incentives weren’t price sufficient to go away their present position.
For starters, the $50,000 bonus is paid in $10,000 yearly increments and requires a five-year work dedication. And in states like California, the place an employment advert reveals a pay vary of $49,000-$89,000 for ICE deportation officers, cops could make about the identical quantity working in their very own communities.
And a few businesses in California have supplied higher incentives than ICE for brand spanking new hires. In 2023, the Alameda Police Division supplied a $75,000 signing bonus to officers coming from different businesses, on prime of a six-figure beginning wage. The division nonetheless struggled to recruit.
Officers additionally could also be fascinated with extra than simply the cash, says Jim Burch, president of the Nationwide Policing Institute. Burch remembers a roundtable dialogue his group hosted for legislation enforcement leaders final yr in Phoenix. When recruitment and retention got here up, he mentioned, he was shocked to listen to that chiefs and sheriffs within the cities had extra hassle recruiting than their suburban counterparts, although the bigger cities sometimes supply increased salaries.
What he discovered was that many officers most popular the smaller businesses, even when they paid much less, so long as the group and metropolis leaders had a observe report of supporting legislation enforcement. Burch questions why officers who take pleasure in a lighter work tempo in a much less hectic atmosphere would go away their jobs for the comparatively longer hours ICE brokers seem to work, presumably dealing with extra violent encounters and intense outrage and protests.
However, Burch mentioned, ICE officers get to work in a spot the place they get unparalleled assist from inside management and the Trump administration.
“I believe it’ll be attention-grabbing to return and have a look at this 10 years from now and see who took these jobs, what occurs to their careers long run and the place they find yourself,” Burch mentioned of the ICE recruitment.
