DHS says it is recruiting “the best of the best” for its ICE hiring spree. We now have a peek at who that includes. After hackers leaked DHS personnel records in October, The Washington Post checked about 300 newly hired ICE officers. It turned up a former Detroit cop who fatally shot a fleeing teenager in the back, an incident that cost his department a $2.5 million settlement; a former New York detective who pleaded guilty after helping swipe nearly $3,000 worth of champagne at a music festival; and a Mississippi officer who said under oath that he couldn’t remember core constitutional rights.
Here’s The Washington Post’s tally:
The Post found at least 19 officers who had faced past allegations of misconduct or criminal charges, or had other employment red flags. At least five involved use-of-force incidents, and five officers were named in lawsuits that resulted in settlements. In at least six cases, the officers had been fired or decertified, or resigned under threat of dismissal. The leaked information represents a small fraction of the 12,000 officers DHS said it had hired as of January. ... John Roth, a former DHS inspector general, was one of the three experts who reviewed the cases for The Post. ... “This is a pretty bad list of conduct,” Roth said. “Absent some other kinds of facts that would exculpate some of these people, they have no business having a gun and a badge in the federal workforce.”
DHS insists that ICE “diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations,” while admitting that some officers start on “temporary status” before their background checks are done. A whistleblower said last year that the agency was hiring recruits without completing basic identity and fingerprint checks. At least two of the new hires have already been involved in shootings, one of which killed a young father. When the goal is a bigger, more ideologically reliable force for Trump’s deportation agenda, vetting becomes friction.
And the Post only got through about 300 of the 12,000 new hires. An agency that already shrugs at the Constitution, encourages unjustified force, and whose agents keep getting arrested was never going to be too choosy.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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