ICE officials burnt out and struggling with Trump’s immigration crackdown
The American Immigration and Customs Application Agency (ICE), a driving force in Donald Trump’s radical repression against migrants, is struggling with generalized exhaustion and frustration among its staff.
Strengthened by record funding and new latitude for raids, the staff face long hours and an increasing public indignation in the face of arrests.
Two former officials of the current ICE and nine said that the agents had trouble keeping the pace of the administration’s aggressive execution program.
While all those questioned supported the application of immigration in principle, they criticized the thrust of the Trump administration for high daily arrest quotas.
These led to the detention of thousands of people without a criminal record, holders of long-term green cards, holders of legal visas and even American citizens. Most current and old ice officials have requested anonymity, fearing reprisals.
The agency has launched a recruitment campaign to mitigate stress by hiring thousands of new officers as quickly as possible, although this process should take months or even years to materialize.
The Americans were flooded with images on the social networks of agents often masked in tactical equipment handling people in the streets of the neighborhood, in construction sites, external schools, churches and courthouses, and in their alleys.
Videos of certain arrests have become viral, fueling public anger at tactics.
Under Trump, the agency’s average daily arrests of 21,000 people have soaked, up more than 250% in June compared to a year earlier, although daily arrest rates fell in July.
Trump said he wanted to expel “the worst of the worst”, but the ice figures show an increase in non-criminals.
Arrests on the ice of people without other accusation or convictions beyond immigration violations during the first six months of Trump office reached 221 people per day, from 80 people per day during the same period under the former president Joe Biden last year, according to data from the agency obtained by the deportation data project at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
Some 69% of immigration arrests under Trump were people with a criminal conviction or a pending accusation, according to figures.
Some ice investigators are frustrated that hundreds of specialized ice investigation agents, which normally focus on serious crimes such as trafficking in human beings and transnational gangs, have been reassigned to the migration routine application, two and two former managers said.
In an interview with Reuters, Trump’s Tsar Frontier, Tom Homan, admitted that long hours and the reallowing of specialized agents had frustrated ice personnel, but said that the Trump Declaration of January 20 of a national emergency around illegal immigration had justified it.
“There is staff who prefer to do other types of surveys, I understand this, but the president said a national emergency,” said Homan.
Homan, who spent three decades in the application of immigration and joined ICE when it was created in 2003, said that long hours should decrease as the hiring of the new ice personnel is accelerating.
“I think morale is good. I think morale will go even better as we bring more resources,” he said.
Another factor of stress for senior officials is the perpetual threat of being withdrawn for incapacity to produce arrests, underlined by multiple changes in ice leading since Trump took office in January, five of ice officials said.
In response to a request for comments, a senior official from the American Department of Internal Security, the ICE parental agency, minimized morale concerns, claiming that the officers were most embarrassed to be targeted in the attacks, as well as the critics of the Democrats.
The senior official said that ICE staff “was delighted to be able to redo his work” after being subjected to limits under Biden.
Intense pressure
At the center of the complaints, current and former officials of the ICE said that the demand of the White House for Ice increases the immigration arrest figures to around 3,000 per day, 10 times the daily arrest rate last year under the Democratic predecessor of Trump, former President Joe Biden.
In some cases, the officers on the raids went to bad addresses according to the tracks based on artificial intelligence, increasing the chances of collecting the bad person or putting an officer in danger, according to a current and two former civil servants.
“The requests they imposed on us were not realistic.
During the recent raids in several American cities, masked ice agents were confronted with angry residents demanding that they identify and chasing them from the neighborhoods.
“In many communities, they are not considered favorably for the work they do. So I am sure that it is stressful for them and their families,” Kerry Doyle, a former high -level legal advisor, told Ice.
ICE also faced the counterpouss during the presidency of Trump 2017-2021, when activists and some Democrats have “abolished the ice” a rallying cry, but the agency’s more aggressive application in recent months has still put it under the spotlight.
Trump’s public approval rating on immigration fell 43% in a Reuters / Ipsos survey in August, against a 50% summit in March while Americans had an increasingly weak vision of his heavy tactics against migrants.
This point of view was partly shaped by information on students arrested on campuses or on their way to the practice of sport, parents detained while depositing children at school, ice agents breaking the windows and pulling people from cars and men surrounded and chained while waiting for bus stops or home deposits to travel to work.
A former ice official said at the start of the administration, several former colleagues told him that they were happy that the “wrists were turned off”.
But several months later, he said, they are “exceeded” by the arrest figures that the administration is demanding.
“They would prefer to return to a concentrated targeting,” he said. “They could say:” We stop criminals. “”
Hiring
A set of expenses supported by the Republican adopted by the US Congress in July gave ICE more money than almost all other federal law enforcement organizations combined – $ 75 billion over a little over four years – including funds to hold at least 100,000 migrants at any time.
The Trump administration has launched a vigorous recruitment campaign at the rear of the new funding to reach its goal of hiring 10,000 ice officers over the next four years.
Using posters and slogans of war -wave war style such as “America Need You”, Ice launched a very unusual media blitz for a government agency, spreading advertisements on social media platforms like Instagram and Youtube.
Homeland Security said that more than 115,000 “patriotic Americans” had applied for jobs with ice, although he did not say on what period.
The madness of ice hiring resembles a similar increase in border patrol agents on board in the mid -2000s, that criticisms claim increased corruption and fault in its ranks.
Asked about the risk of using less qualified people in the precipitation to staff, Homan said that ice should choose “quality rather than quantity”.
“The officers must still go through substantive investigations, they must always be verified, they must always ensure that they go to the Academy,” said Homan.
