NEWS & RESEARCH
In order to meet the Trump administration’s increasing demands for mass deportations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) needed to quickly recruit more officers. However, in its rush to do so, the agency allegedly cut corners by fast-tracking the hiring of unqualified, “improperly vetted” candidates. According to a whistleblower report, individuals were able to begin ICE training without having their identities, criminal histories, or other background information checked. The whistleblower, a former Trump supporter, calls the move an “unprecedented lowering of standards” that could cause “grave national security risks.” These changes came alongside decreased training time for new ICE hires—which was slashed from roughly ten weeks to six—and easier testing, with exams made open book. The agency also dropped its age and education requirements and even allowed some recruits to take online courses rather than completing on-site training. And officials seemed to know the risks that they were running. Ryan Schwank, a former ICE lawyer, testified that many new recruits appeared unfit for service, saying, “We were concerned about ICE recruiting a loose cannon or somebody who was just mentally unfit for the role. We knew that kind of person would get through.” In October 2026, a Trump-appointed judge called out ICE agents for their lack of training after they violently arrested two men by mistake—one of whom was a US citizen who suffered head injuries from the encounter, and neither of whom looked anything like the agency’s intended targets. The judge found that the officers were inexperienced and possessed little understanding of the law and used “false testimony” in court to try to conceal their “failings.”
SOURCES: New York Times | New York Times | PBS | NBC | Slate
ANALYSIS & OPINION
The rush to hire and deploy has been deadly. Take the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the United States and was shot by inexperienced ICE agents who were looking for another man. David Brouillette, the officer accused of killing Durán Guerrero, was hired by ICE just a few months prior despite a documented history of violence. A protection order filed by his ex-wife claims that he was abusive and broke her door down, while a separate police report says that he threw his teenage daughter through a glass table. Military recruiters rejected him in the past over mental health concerns, as did his local police unit, which denied Brouillette’s job applications because there were simply “too many red flags.” Yet, Brouillette’s former wife says she doesn't even know whether he was made to pass a background check before ICE hired him. And it’s very possible that he didn’t—the agency has been vetting so loosely that one Slate reporter was offered a job with no drug test or background check at all. But it hasn’t always been this way. Before ICE’s recruitment surges under the Trump administration, the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility would review documents for each potential hire, including fingerprints and a security form with extensive questions. They would then search law enforcement databases for criminal records or other serious warning signs. Some applicants would even be sent for a polygraph test. And after all of these steps were complete, the person would then go through a full background check by outside contractors who would “determine whether the candidate was trustworthy enough to have access to sensitive computer systems, federal facilities and classified information.” Under Trump, this entire system was upended.
SOURCES: New York Times | New York Times | CBS | PBS | NBC | Slate
HOW TO FIX IT
Federal action:
Consider passing the Abolish ICE Act, to dismantle the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and end its current enforcement authority, and the Melt Ice Act, which would end the Department of Homeland Security’s funding to detain or monitor immigrants. Legitimate functions of ICE and DHS would be transferred to other federal agencies.
Pass the Make Ice Pay Act, which would redirect $140 billion designated for ICE and Customs and Border Protection to states, local government authorities, nonprofit organizations and small businesses adversely affected by Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown.
Pass the Justice in Policing Act. This bill would strip all federal law enforcement officers—including, by definition (28 U.S.C. § 2680(h)), ICE agents—of their qualified immunity, the legal shield that lets officers escape accountability in court, no matter how egregious their misconduct. It would also mandate body cameras and dashcams, require independent investigations of killings by federal officers, create a national misconduct registry, and set a deadly-force-as-last-resort standard. If the act does not get passed as an entirety, Congress could introduce bills regarding individual components of this legislation.
Pass a statute that lets people sue over ICE's constitutional violations. Congress would have to expressly grant the right to sue through a bill like the Accountability for Federal Law Enforcement Act, which would let individuals—regardless of citizenship—sue federal officers and agencies for constitutional violations, or the ICE and CBP Constitutional Accountability Act, which amends the Federal Tort Claims Act to make the government liable for ICE violations specifically, allowing the families of the people who were killed to hold ICE accountable in federal court.
Pass the Under Color of Law Accountability Act, which would make it a federal crime for anyone acting under color of law—ICE officers included—to use excessive force.
Pass the Federal Law Enforcement Standards and Accountability (FLESA) Act. Introduced after ICE killings in Minneapolis, the bill sets enforceable minimum standards for federal law-enforcement hiring and training. It would prohibit the kind of abbreviated training that cut ICE's academy from 13 weeks to six, bar agencies from deploying officers before their background checks are complete, block the hiring of anyone affiliated with a hate group, and apply these standards to officers already on the job. Agency officials who deploy officers without the required qualifications and training would face disciplinary actions. Importantly, the bill would also authorize states to bring civil actions against federal agencies like ICE that violate individuals’ constitutional rights.
Pass the Immigration Enforcement Staff Body Camera Accountability Act. It mandates body cameras for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and says that officers who fail to record will face furlough, pay cuts, or suspension. It also establishes that a non-recording can't be written off as a "malfunction" unless the officer can prove it. Congress could strengthen this legislation even further by adding an adverse-inference rule, stating that any missing footage is presumed unfavorable to the agency. Other legislation, like the FOCUS Act, would go broader, extending a camera mandate to all federal officers doing immigration enforcement—instead of just ICE and CBP agents—but it leaves the consequences for not recording up to each agency rather than writing them into law.
Codify use-of-force standards. Proposed by Democratic leaders, this would write a reasonable use-of-force policy into law, expand training, require officer certification, and pull any officer involved in an incident from the field until an investigation is done. One step in this direction is the ICE Standards Act, which would require mandatory training in de-escalation and require not only body cameras but also set mandatory initial and annual training standards for immigration officers and require DHS to report to Congress on the training agents currently receive.
Pass the DHS Use of Force Transparency Act, which would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, to turn over evidence in ICE-related injuries and deaths to Congress, including body-camera footage and incident reports.
Pass legislation mandating that DHS publicly release the officer's name and all footage within 72 hours of a fatal shooting. Such transparency is important, because even if officers wear cameras, the administration could still withhold that footage. And even more than a week after the Houston shooting, DHS has still not released the identity of the agent who was responsible for the killing.
Condition ICE funding on granting state and local investigators scene access and honoring state judicial warrants. In Houston, ICE denied the local District Attorney (DA) and his team access to the scene, even though the DA’s office was conducting its own investigation and such access would normally be granted in an officer-involved shooting. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, investigators were turned away by DHS from a fatal-shooting scene despite holding a signed judicial warrant.
Bar the deportation of any noncitizen who witnessed a federal officer's use of force or serious misconduct until the resulting investigation and proceedings conclude. This closes an obvious conflict of interest: the government should not be able to deport the very people who witnessed its officers' conduct.
Pass legislation prohibiting arrest quotas and requiring individualized, documented probable cause for each stop by ICE. When the incentive is to hit a daily number, agents are pressured to act first and verify later—like how they boxed in Salgado Araujo’s van because they thought someone inside merely “resembled” the actual person they were looking for. While removing quotas would not, on its own, stop a violent or reckless officer from pulling the trigger, it would eliminate one of the systemic pressures that put encounters like this in motion to begin with.
Pass the FITNESS Act, which would freeze ICE hiring until the agency shows that all current officers meet eligibility and training requirements. It would also require full background investigations, medical evaluations, and core training before any federal officer is deployed, and hold accountable officials who knowingly put unqualified officers in the field.
Pass the DHS Hiring Review Act, which would require DHS to audit the hiring records of every ICE and CBP agent hired since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act became law, to confirm that background checks and all other hiring requirements were actually completed. It would also require the federal law enforcement training academy to certify that every agent finished the required training for their position.
Pass legislation that would temporarily suspend field enforcement duties for officers hired during ICE’s surge until they complete a full background investigation and retraining, and require ICE to remove those who fail. Senators Padilla, Booker, and Blumenthal urged DHS this month to take this step voluntarily, and the Center for American Progress has called for re-screening every surge hire. The audit bills only check paperwork, but this would get unvetted officers off the streets immediately.
Pass the COOL IT Act, which would require ICE officers to complete at least 67 days of training before carrying out immigration enforcement, so the agency can’t legally cut training again. It would also require annual scenario-based training in de-escalation, officer safety, crisis intervention, and community relations.
Pass the Freeze ICE Act, which would impose an immediate hiring freeze at ICE until Congress lifts it, halting the rapid recruitment of unvetted officers while lawmakers put proper vetting and training standards in place.
Reintroduce and pass the Integrity in Border and Immigration Enforcement Act, which would require every applicant for an ICE or CBP law enforcement job to pass a polygraph before being hired, and would add random and targeted polygraphs for current officers. It was written in response to an earlier Trump hiring surge to keep vetting standards from slipping.
Pass the Federal Law Enforcement Standards and Accountability (FLESA) Act, which would ban shortened or accelerated training programs for federal officers. It would also bar anyone from doing federal law enforcement work before finishing all background checks, hiring requirements, and pre-employment training, the exact shortcut the ICE whistleblower described.
Pass legislation that would require every ICE applicant to pass a psychological evaluation by a licensed professional before hiring, and require fitness-for-duty evaluations after any use of deadly or excessive force. Minnesota offers a model: it screens police applicants with a standard personality test that flags traits like aggressiveness and dishonesty, and research shows these tests can accurately predict officers’ future performance.
Pass legislation that would require ICE arrest warrants and records to be electronically timestamped, so they can’t be created or changed after an arrest. Officers whom a court finds falsified records should be fired and referred for prosecution. This would address the situation in New York in which ICE agents mistakenly arrested a man and then issued a fake warrant afterward to cover up their mistake.
Pass legislation that would restore a minimum age of 21 for ICE officers, matching most federal law enforcement agencies. DHS eliminated ICE’s age limits in 2025 as part of its hiring push, which means agents can be issued a handgun at an age when federal law would bar them from buying one.
Push the Government Accountability Office to carry out the review that House Homeland Security Democrats requested regarding how ICE changed its hiring standards and training during the surge, including whether recruits began training before their background checks were complete.
Press the DHS inspector general to publicly release its audit of ICE’s hiring and training, which it announced more than a year ago and is yet to publish.
State action:
Pass bills like Kansas’s proposal requiring ICE agents operating in the state to complete training equal to the state’s 14-week program for law enforcement officers.
Open state investigations into shootings and wrongful arrests by ICE agents, so state attorneys general and local prosecutors can hold undertrained and improperly vetted officers accountable when federal officials won’t.
Pass bills like California’s No Kings Act (SB 747), which lets individuals file civil lawsuits against federal officials through state court. Although Egbert bars these suits in federal court, a state-law right to sue offers a way around that wall.
Litigation:
Pursue lawsuits like the one Durán Guerrero’s family plans to file, which accuses ICE of “intentionally hiring unqualified agents." Cases like this put ICE’s vetting of agents like Brouillette under scrutiny in court and make the government answer financially for the consequences.
Back legal action, like Jeury Concepción’s planned lawsuit over his violent arrest by ICE in New York, which would hold the government accountable when undertrained agents wrongfully detain and injure US citizens.
Hold ICE to court orders like the ruling in the New York case, where a judge found that inexperienced agents made illegal arrests and falsified records to cover them up. The ruling requires ICE to explain how it will discipline officers and prevent it from happening again, and the judge did not rule out penalties or contempt if the agency’s response falls short.
Pursue public records lawsuits like Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center et al. v. US Department of Justice, which seeks records on why the Trump administration shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, or NLEAD. The database tracked misconduct and disciplinary records for federal officers so that agencies like ICE could check whether job applicants had been disciplined in past federal law enforcement roles before hiring them. However, the database went dark just months before ICE’s hiring surge began. Exposing why it was shut down could build the case for restoring it. (Note that the aforementioned FLESA Act would also restore NLEAD.)
File public records lawsuits for ICE’s own vetting and training records, which could force the agency to disclose how many surge hires started work before their background checks were complete.
Bring class action lawsuits like Castañon Nava v. Department of Homeland Security in Chicago, which led to a settlement requiring ICE to retrain its officers nationwide and document the basis for warrantless arrests in the region. When ICE violated the settlement under Trump, a judge ordered the agency to certify that its officers had been retrained and to file monthly public reports on every warrantless arrest there, a model for court-ordered fixes in cities like New York.
Legislation: H.R.7123 - Abolish ICE Act | H.R. 7190 - Melt ICE Act |H.R.5361 - Justice in Policing Act | S.3470 - Accountability for Federal Law Enforcement Act | H.R.7297 - ICE and CBP Constitutional Accountability Act | S.3804 - Under Color of Law Accountability Act | H.R.4651 - Immigration Enforcement Staff Body Camera Accountability Act | S.3699 - FOCUS Act | H.R.7870 - ICE Standards Act | H.R.7984 - DHS Use of Force Transparency Act of 2026 | H.R. 8639 - COOL IT Act | H.R. 7870 - ICE Standards Act | H.R. 7392 - Freeze ICE Act | S. 1560 - Integrity in Border and Immigration Enforcement Act | SB 747 (California) | S. 5376 - FITNESS Act | S. 3996 - DHS Hiring Review Act
