ICE’s “Sh*t Show” Recruitment Push Leaves Stephen Miller Fuming

It appears Stephen Miller’s quest to hire 10,000 so-called “homeland defenders” by January isn’t going very well.

At a multi-agency meeting earlier this week, Miller expressed frustration that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not bringing in deportation agents quickly enough. CNN reported Thursday. Meanwhile, multiple sources told CNN that ICE has struggled to process the sudden influx of applicants after the agency waved a $50,000 signing bonus under their noses, hoping to entice Americans to join the legion of law enforcement officials tearing families apart.

“It’s a shit show,” one administration official told CNN.

A senior ICE official told CNN that “HR is not equipped to hire en masse,” adding, “No one has support staff to support this.” In fact, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has had to lend staff to help handle the influx of ICE requests, which DHS says has soared to 175,000.

ICE officials are really feeling the pressure when new recruits arrive for the agency’s training program, where more than 200 applicants have already been kicked out of the program because they didn’t meet physical or academic requirements, a source told CNN.

Sources said NBC News On Wednesday, several new recruits had arrived for training without having been properly screened, and just under a dozen of them had been turned away because of disqualifying criminal histories or failed drug tests. At the ICE training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, staff discovered that a recruit had previously been involved in a domestic violence incident and had been charged with armed robbery and battery. DHS officials told NBC News that other recruits participating in the six-week training did not submit their fingerprints for background checks, as required by ICE.

CNN reported that in one case, ICE made a conditional offer to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, which was only intercepted by the DEA. In another case, an individual was facing a firearm-related charge.

The errors come as the Trump administration has attempted to speed up the onboarding process, which previously took months, to a partially remote process that takes just 47 days, CNN reported.

Scott Shuchart, a former policy official at ICE during the Biden administration, suggested the Trump administration went too far in trying to streamline the process. “They are trying to do something borderline impossible and they are doing it too quickly,” he told CNN.