During a multi-agency meeting earlier this week, Miller voiced frustration that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasn’t bringing in deportation officers fast enough, CNN reported Thursday. Meanwhile, multiple sources told CNN that ICE has struggled to process the sudden surge of applicants after the agency dangled a $50,000 signing bonus in front of their noses, in the hopes of enticing Americans to join the legion of law enforcement officials ripping families apart.
“It’s a shit show,” an administration official told CNN.
Sources told NBC News Wednesday that multiple new recruits had arrived for training without being properly vetted, and just under 10 were turned away due to disqualifying criminal backgrounds or failed drug testing. At ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, staff discovered one recruit had previously been involved in a domestic violence incident, and was once charged with strong-arm robbery and battery. DHS officials told NBC News that other recruits in the six-week training course had not submitted their fingerprints for background checks, which is required by ICE.
CNN reported that in one case, ICE gave a conditional offer to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, which was only caught by the DEA. In another case, an individual had a pending gun charge.
These mistakes come as the Trump administration has attempted to speed up the onboarding process, which used to take months, into a partially remote process that only takes 47 days, CNN reported.
Scott Shuchart, former head of policy at ICE during the Biden administration, suggested that the Trump administration had gone too far in attempting to streamline the process.“They’re trying to do something borderline impossible and they’re doing it too fast,” he told CNN.
I'm not exactly sure when they streamlined the process, but I think they're saying ICE has had a surge of applications since the sign on bonus was offered. Normally those applicants would take months to process just to get to the point of being scheduled for training. (detailed employment history, criminal background checks, fingerprinting, not to mention probably their own citizenship/legal status).
Then from that point, if everything checks out during onboarding they're supposed to go through the actual training. But since the onboarding process has been "streamlined," people aren't being weeded out for things that should have kept them from reaching the training stage.
So these are all people it would seem should have been caught beforehand, but bc Stephen Miller is a dumbass micromanaging Nazi shitstain, he is doing that thing everybody in this administration does (demanding impossible results because he doesn't actually know what TF he's doing). Hence the ensuing shit show. Yet, all Miller cares about is numbers and quotas bc that means more money for his private prison and Palantir investments.
Now the people who are supposed to focus on the training process are having to do things that aren't even part of their job in order to screen out people that should have already been screened out. Likely this delays the entire process for everyone bc once again it turns out the inefficient bureaucratic red tape existed for a fucking reason.
I wonder if the result is going to be using the National Guard instead of ICE where they don’t “have enough agents.”