President Donald Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia. It is the ICE personal-fitness test.
More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.
“It’s pathetic,” one career ICE official told me, adding that before now, a typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous.
The academy’s standards have already been eased to boost recruitment, he said, and the new parameters “should be the minimum for any officer.” He and others, none of whom were authorized to speak with reporters, told me that agency veterans are concerned about the quality of the new recruits being fast-tracked onto the street to meet Trump’s hiring goals.
An email from ICE headquarters to the agency’s top officials on October 5 lamented that “a considerable amount of athletically allergic candidates” had been showing up to the academy; they had “misrepresented” their physical condition on application forms. The email directed leaders at ICE’s field offices to conduct preliminary fitness exams with new recruits before sending them to the academy.
“We all know the self-certification method has failed,” Ralph Ferguson, an operations official at ICE headquarters, wrote.
The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told me in a statement that the one-third failure rate reflected only “a subset of candidates in initial basic academy classes,” and not all new hires. She said DHS expects to fill 85 percent of new deportation-officer positions with experienced law-enforcement officials whom they can fast-track. Although they will not be required to pass a fitness test at the ICE academy, “they remain subject to medical, fitness, and background requirements,” McLaughlin wrote.
The Trump administration has slashed the amount of time that new ICE recruits spend at the federal-law-enforcement training academy in Georgia, from roughly four months to eight weeks. Some of the fresh hires have dropped out of the academy after flunking exams on immigration law and Fourth Amendment limits on officers’ search authority, one official told me. But the fitness test has been the biggest nemesis to the new recruits. The 1.5-mile run, in particular, has toppled more trainees than any other requirement, two officials said.
The requirement is not arbitrary. Under Trump, ICE has tripled the number of people it arrests on U.S. streets, and, as more and more social-media videos show, being a deportation officer often involves chasing people through parking lots and wrestling them to the ground. Veteran officials typically want younger officers to be the ones doing the chasing and the tackling. And if they have to face angry crowds, they want capable backup.
Senior ICE officials have moved up the fitness test on the academy’s calendar in hopes of weeding out unfit candidates earlier in their training. The agency can’t afford to waste slots at the academy with recruits “who can’t even do push-ups,” one official said.
McLaughlin confirmed the change, but insisted that the department wasn’t cutting corners. “We are moving fitness checks earlier in the training sequence to improve efficiency and accountability—not to lower standards,” she told me. (This all comes as Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has overhauled military fitness standards and implemented new testing requirements that include push-ups, running drills, and weight lifting.)
ICE is offering a $50,000 hiring-and-retention bonus, along with student-loan forgiveness and other enticements. New hires are being told to report to work in sneakers so they can more easily drop and do crunches and push-ups on the carpets of crowded agency offices. The logistics of staging a timed 1.5-mile run have been more difficult to coordinate, one official told me.
And what happens when someone fails the pre-screening or the academy test? ICE’s field-office directors can try to rotate those candidates to an administrative job or another position with lower fitness standards. But with so many candidates failing, the directors have had to seek guidance from ICE’s legal department as to whether to revoke job offers. The attorneys told them to cut loose new hires who fail if they aren’t fit for other openings at ICE. But they have to assign them administrative tasks to perform while waiting for ICE’s human resources to issue termination letters. “It’s a disaster,” one senior ICE official told me.
DHS has boasted that ICE has received more than 175,000 applications from its recruitment drive as it rushes to spend some of the $75 billion in new funds it received from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act this summer. But that figure is not quite as large as it seems. The number of unique individuals who have applied is about 50,000, one official told me, because many people have applied for multiple positions. There are three pools of candidates: new recruits with no training, current law-enforcement officers, and recently retired ICE officials who can come back and continue collecting their pensions in addition to a salary.
The new recruits are the only ones who have to complete the fitness test. Retirees and currently employed law-enforcement officers can “self-certify” without being tested. The latter group will comprise the bulk of new hires for the deportation-officer jobs, according to DHS officials, who insist that the overall goal of 10,000 additions by January remains on track.
Those hired from other police agencies have a much easier path, and many are already reporting for work at ICE field offices while they complete online training courses in immigration law and Fourth Amendment procedures. But one official told me that ICE does not have enough guns or vehicles for everyone, and the lack of experience among new hires with booking and processing procedures means they’re not especially helpful for administrative tasks. Other ICE field offices are short of parking spaces and bathroom capacity to accommodate a two- or threefold jump in staffing, a senior official told me. They’ve been told to divide up cubicles and look for additional space to lease.
I wrote to eight people I met who applied for ICE jobs at a hiring expo outside Dallas in late August. Of the five who responded, four did not get offers. Only one said he remained in the pipeline for a job.
He runs triathlons and isn’t worried about the fitness test. But since completing a lengthy questionnaire for his background check a week ago, he hasn’t heard back. “There have been some twists and turns,” he wrote. “I suspect it may be a while with the government shutdown.”
