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“Are you ready to defend the homeland?”
“AMERICA NEEDS YOU.”
These are some of the latest appeals in a months-long, multi-million-dollar recruitment campaign by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire thousands of new agents and support staff to accelerate deportations nationwide.
As of September, the blitz seemed to be working — the agency reported some 150,000 applications from prospective agents. Some new recruits are recent college grads. Others are looking to change careers. But one group of people has emerged as both controversial and the most coveted potential new ICE agents: law enforcement officers already working for city and state agencies.
Several police chiefs and sheriffs have accused the federal agency of trying to poach their officers after ICE officials emailed them offering cash incentives to leave their jobs in places like Florida and New Hampshire.
Some of the emails from ICE appear to be specifically targeting people from agencies that have already agreed to deputize officers as part-time federal agents to help find and detain undocumented immigrants.
“Someone in Washington needs to lose their jobs over this, because this is ridiculous,” Florida’s Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said in August of the recruiting emails, which came less than two months after Ivey vowed to shoot people ”graveyard dead” in defense of ICE officers.
Other Florida Sheriffs, including Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood, shared similar sentiments with reporters over the summer, stating that ICE officials used the data the sheriffs had freely shared to target their officers.
The federal government is also targeting recruits from police forces in so-called sanctuary cities. In Atlanta, the feds spent nearly $1 million in a single week on an advertising campaign designed to lure local law enforcement away from departments where ICE says the officers are “ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals” roam free.
The federal blitz is making it harder for local and state police agencies to recruit and retain sworn officers, a problem that has plagued law enforcement since before the COVID pandemic. Three years ago, my then-colleague Weihua Li and I chronicled how the ongoing exodus from policing was part of an overall trend of people dropping government jobs for entrepreneurship or more lucrative jobs in the private sector.
Police chiefs and sheriffs told us that they were trying everything they could to get and keep good officers, including offering cash incentives, lowering training and education requirements, dropping age restrictions and even pushing to relax citizenship requirements in some places. Since then, other law enforcement leaders have called recruitment and retention the most important challenge facing the profession aside from violent crime.
Now they face stiff competition from ICE recruiters, who can dangle more perks than most city and state agencies ever could — including offers of up to $50,000 in signing bonuses, another $60,000 in tuition reimbursement and an extra 25% premium pay for some special agent roles.
But the campaign doesn’t appear to be working everywhere. Just this week, the San Francisco Police Department reported its biggest recruitment surge in the past five years. And in Oakland, law enforcement leaders teamed up with the NAACP in their push to replace the six officers, on average, that they’re losing every month to retirement and other departures. It’s a tactic unlikely to see a parallel in federal agencies like ICE, which operates under a Department of Justice that has openly discarded diversity initiatives under the Trump administration.
The promises that ICE is using to attract applicants are not universally appealing, either. An officer in San Diego told the Washington Examiner that ICE’s financial incentives weren’t worth enough to leave their current role.
For starters, the $50,000 bonus is paid in $10,000 yearly increments and requires a five-year work commitment. And in states like California, where an employment ad shows a pay range of $49,000-$89,000 for ICE deportation officers, cops can make about the same amount working in their own communities.
And some agencies in California have offered better incentives than ICE for new hires. In 2023, the Alameda Police Department offered a $75,000 signing bonus to officers coming from other agencies, on top of a six-figure starting salary. The department still struggled to recruit.
Officers also may be thinking about more than just the money, says Jim Burch, president of the National Policing Institute. Burch remembers a roundtable discussion his organization hosted for law enforcement leaders last year in Phoenix. When recruitment and retention came up, he said, he was surprised to hear that chiefs and sheriffs in the cities had more trouble recruiting than their suburban counterparts, even though the larger cities typically offer higher salaries.
What he found was that many officers preferred the smaller agencies, even if they paid less, as long as the community and city leaders had a track record of supporting law enforcement. Burch questions why officers who enjoy a lighter work pace in a less hectic environment would leave their jobs for the comparatively longer hours ICE agents appear to work, possibly facing more violent encounters and intense outrage and protests.
On the other hand, Burch said, ICE officers get to work in a place where they get unparalleled support from internal leadership and the Trump administration.
“I think it’ll be interesting to go back and look at this 10 years from now and see who took these jobs, what happens to their careers long term and where they end up,” Burch said of the ICE recruitment.
