\n<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s training academy in Georgia. It is the ICE personal-fitness test.<\/p>\n
More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s pathetic,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The academy\u2019s standards have already been eased to boost recruitment, he said, and the new parameters \u201cshould be the minimum for any officer.\u201d 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\u2019s hiring goals.<\/p>\n
An email from ICE headquarters to the agency\u2019s top officials on October 5 lamented that \u201ca considerable amount of athletically allergic candidates\u201d had been showing up to the academy; they had \u201cmisrepresented\u201d their physical condition on application forms. The email directed leaders at ICE\u2019s field offices to conduct preliminary fitness exams with new recruits before sending them to the academy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all know the self-certification method has failed,\u201d Ralph Ferguson, an operations official at ICE headquarters, wrote.<\/p>\n
The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told me in a statement that the one-third failure rate reflected only \u201ca subset of candidates in initial basic academy classes,\u201d 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, \u201cthey remain subject to medical, fitness, and background requirements,\u201d McLaughlin wrote.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Senior ICE officials have moved up the fitness test on the academy\u2019s calendar in hopes of weeding out unfit candidates earlier in their training. The agency can\u2019t afford to waste slots at the academy with recruits \u201cwho can\u2019t even do push-ups,\u201d one official said.<\/p>\n
McLaughlin confirmed the change, but insisted that the department wasn\u2019t cutting corners. \u201cWe are moving fitness checks earlier in the training sequence to improve efficiency and accountability\u2014not to lower standards,\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And what happens when someone fails the pre-screening or the academy test? ICE\u2019s 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\u2019s legal department as to whether to revoke job offers. The attorneys told them to cut loose new hires who fail if they aren\u2019t fit for other openings at ICE. But they have to assign them administrative tasks to perform while waiting for ICE\u2019s human resources to issue termination letters. \u201cIt\u2019s a disaster,\u201d one senior ICE official told me.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The new recruits are the only ones who have to complete the fitness test. Retirees and currently employed law-enforcement officers can \u201cself-certify\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re 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\u2019ve been told to divide up cubicles and look for additional space to lease.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He runs triathlons and isn\u2019t worried about the fitness test. But since completing a lengthy questionnaire for his background check a week ago, he hasn\u2019t heard back. \u201cThere have been some twists and turns,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI suspect it may be a while with the government shutdown.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[3391,17369,4505],"class_list":{"0":"post-29388","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-failing","9":"tag-iceacademy","10":"tag-recruits"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}