Well, if it isn’t the consequences of the government’s own actions.
ICE can generate multiple horrible stories a day but it still can’t seem to find enough brown people to deport daily to satisfy White House advisor Stephen Miller’s demands for 3,000 arrests per day.
Trump and the GOP threw a lot of money at this problem with the Big Beautiful Bill. A lot of money: $75 billion over the next four years. Part of that goes to another metric ICE will apparently never meet: 10,000 new hires.
Not that ICE isn’t trying. It’s currently pissing off law enforcement agencies all over the country by throwing $50,000 signing bonuses at new recruits — something that has the potential to deprive local law enforcement of some of their current, um… talent. It has also lowered its standards and ripped the age limits off both ends of the scale, hoping to attract a blend of people who’ve already aged out of physical work and fresh faces their new bosses will likely assume don’t really want work.
Now that it’s been a few months since the hiring surge began, we’re finally seeing some results. And it’s possibly worse than you imagine.
When you need Brownshirts, you generally don’t want people who can easily get and hold other jobs. You want people that feel excluded from society and are willing to be violent about it.
It’s the reality-ignorer’s constant curse. In this form, it is:
“Surely this crew of misfits and failures will be able to successfully execute this important mission we’ve laid out for them with minimal training and oversight”
Later: “How could this have happened? I think we need more misfits”
The ragtag band only wins in the movies.
More than a third have failed so far … To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.
Applicants check a box and sign their names, swearing they don’t have a criminal record and can pass a drug test. Far too late, recruiters are realizing some of these applicants can’t do that either. And, again, they’re not finding this out until potential hires are already at the ICE academy and engaged in the training program.
Sounds like it’s going great
My high school had more strict passing requirements for PE. Not to be ableist or anything, but the physical portion of this test is a pretty low bar for most able-bodied remotely fit people.
As for the drug test portion, this is actually probably the hardest requirement. I’ve seen how strict the drug testing requirement is, and even recreational use of weed can screw you on those tests for longer than you’d think.
Yes, the competency also seems to be in the hr department and the recruiting department at the same level.
I consider myself in pretty bad shape and I just now did 15 push-ups to get some kind of benchmark without having to overly struggle with it. Even considering just the applicant side of it, who are these people thinking that they’re going to do a job which involves physically contesting with people and can’t do these pretty basic physical things?
(I mean, I know the answer to that question, I am just marveling at the situation I guess.)
Just the idea of sit-ups. Yeah, y’all can fuck right the fuck off with that.
I really hope that ice members are tracked down and held accountable for their crimes. Similar to nazi hunters today.
Not shocking at all since it stands for, Internal Criminal Environment
