The ICE hiring boom

In the last year, the Department of Homeland Security says

“"12,000 new agents and officers have joined US immigration”

and customs enforcement or ICE." This was an unprecedented hiring boom that more than doubled ICE's ranks. The agency was aggressive in its recruitment efforts. It waived age requirements and offered signing bonuses

of up to $50,000. The Department of Homeland Security says "It's deploying agents to remove the quote "worst of the worst from the US." This large ramp up has turned ICE into

arguably one of the fastest growing and most scrutinized workplaces in the country right now. That's because its performance is highly visible and at times questionable. The majority of immigrants caught up in this crackdown

have no criminal convictions. Many have legal status and even US citizens have been taken into custody. Recent surveys show an increasing number of Americans saying that immigration crackdown has gone too far.

Some politicians and community leaders are even calling for ICE to be dismantled. Others say they need better training or a culture shift or both.

“Are those changes needed and would they even”

make a difference? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Will and Wong, normally a co-host of Planet Money's daily podcast "The Indicator."

"And I'm Darian Moons." Today on the show, the ICE hiring boom is having domino effects. How has training new officers changed and are what cost?

Also, if the Trump administration has planned support billions of dollars into warehouses for mass immigrant detention centers which can totally change the economy of some areas. We hear from a rural town in Georgia

that once an ice facility in its own backyard. The Trump administration's massive tax

and spending law gave $750 million

to something called the federal law enforcement training centers. These are the facilities that train recruits for ICE, US Border Patrol and US Customs and Border Protection.

Mark Brown taught at the main campus near Brunswick, Georgia for five years. "I enjoy training. I like when the light bulb goes off, so to speak.

The Georgia facility is so big that it has its own zip code. There are dorms, classrooms, and shooting ranges. There's even a mini replica of a city spread out over more than 35 acres.

"It has storefront shops, federal buildings, and then you have like neighborhoods behind it where you have houses. You have duplexes, trailers, partner style buildings.

Because when we would teach, I'm crowd control. We would go over there. We would use that city to show them. Okay, this is how you're going to line up on a street."

Mark, look at the trainees lined up on the street of this fake city. Tell them this is what you do if you're trying to arrest someone and a crowd starts to form,

or maybe there are protesters. "They're protesting on the sidewalk. They have the right to protest your presence. So that's not something for you to engage in. And then as soon as your person is handcuffed,

let's get them up and get them out of there. We don't need to stick around. We don't talk to the crowd. We're not actively going back and forth. We're not here to debate their points.

They're allowed to protest our presence. That's fine. Our biggest thing is keep in everybody safe." Mark says he's not seeing those protocols in some of the videos of federal agents

that are circulating. And that makes them wonder about the training that the newly recruited ISO CBP agents are getting. Well, not getting. So how much instruction do new ice recruits get?

Well, there's been a lot of contradictory information on this, including from the government. Different officials within the DHS have said that the training for immigration agents has been shortened. At the same time, the agency says media outlets are spreading

lies about ice training. We reached out to DHS for clarification. Spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin told us that officers are getting the same number of training hours.

Here's what we were able to figure out.

Based on the numbers we got from DHS. New ice recruits get 14 weeks of training. This is fewer weeks than what ice agents were previously getting. It's also shorter than the national average for state and local law enforcement offices. Matthew Ross is an economist at North Eastern University

who studies police training. He says he's concerned that the program for ice officers has changed significantly in a short amount of time.

“I think there's a lot of reasons to be quite worried about”

what the long term implications of that are going to look like. And even what we're sort of seeing in places like Minneapolis it might be a direct result of that. One major change in the ice training has to do with learning Spanish. Previously, new ice agents got five weeks of Spanish instruction.

DHS spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin told us that the agency replaced those classes with translation services covering multiple languages is not clear what those services are. Matthew says he's also concerned that ice recruits aren't getting enough

That's when new offices are paired with more experience ones

to learn on the job.

“Matthew and some other researchers studied field training using data”

from the Dallas Police Department. They found that if a recruit was assigned to a more aggressive field training officer that recruit was significantly more likely to use force. The furthest we could look out just based on the data we had

was three years from what it from as far as we can tell it. If you happen to get paired up with a with a field training officer that used force frequently, you were just more likely to use force for the entirety of that three year period. And in fact, it could be true that you just use force more for the

rest of your career. Now the words new law enforcement offices model their behavior

after more experience ones and direction from senior

officers whether explicit or implicit could be a bigger influence on new recruits than their formal training. That's according to Steph Stoten. He's a law professor at the University of South Carolina and a policing expert.

He's also a former police officer himself. I would be shocked if some of what we see that's problematic in the way that ice agents and CBP agents are handling these various tasks. I would be shocked if it's actually a training failure at this point

because some of the agents that have been publicly identified are longstanding veterans. Case in points, a Minneapolis, US citizen Alex Pretty appeared to be supporting agents on his cell phone as an observer. The two agents who shot and killed him have been employed since

2014 and 2018 according to Propublica. Doesn't matter how your trained if your supervisor says, you run up to those cars. And if they don't get out immediately, you break the windows. Even if you are trained to not do that, even if you are trained

about why that's a really bad tactic about why that's likely to provoke resistance about how that's likely to contribute to an otherwise avoidable use of force.

“If that's what you're told to do by your supervisor.”

And if that's what you think, the peers around you expect you to do. That's what you're going to do. But Seth and economists Matthew Ross say the expect the administration to face multiple lawsuits over how ice and other federal agencies are conducting their immigration crackdown.

Seth doesn't believe that the possibility of costly future legal settlements will motivate the administration to change its current tactics. One of the things that we've seen from ice at least, and from CBP, is an approach to accountability that I think communicates to

agents that it's just performative. That really removes one of the legs from the stool that we use to get officers' agents to perform as professionals. The financial incentives alone probably aren't going to do anything especially not with an agency that just views that as the cost of doing

business. For her part, DHS spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin told us that ice

recruits get the same training they always have.

By the way, DHS confirms to MPR last week that McLaughlin will be leaving the agency. She's been the administration's public face in defending the mass deportation policy over the last year. Earlier this week, a former ice lawyer spoke at a forum held by congressional Democrats. He said the agency's training program was

"deficient, defective, and broken." Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal's office also released documents it said came from ice whistleblowers. The documents if here to show that new ice recruits are getting 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts.

In a statement this week, DHS said again that ice officers are getting the same amount of training as before. After the break, we look at how ice is planning to spend over $38 billion on detention centers. One world town in Georgia is trying to balance the economic benefits

with the tension associated with an ice facility in its own backyard. There are about 71,000 people in detention right now, which is a record high. So at this point, you might be asking yourself,

"Where are these increasing numbers of people being held?" To help me explain all of this, I'm joined by MPR Sergio Martinez Beltran. He covers immigration. Welcome to the indicator, Sergio. Hey, Wayne. Thanks so much for the invite.

You know, the short answer to that question you post is that the administration is building and expanding huge detention centers across the country, many in small economically depressed towns. The Trump administration has dramatically changed how we, as a country, approach immigration enforcement.

“Remember, there were millions of removals under President Obama,”

but the majority of those removals were at the border. The Trump administration is going hard on enforcement in the interior,

And we know Trump is ambitious.

“His administration has said it even wants to be able to carry out”

even more detentions. The goal, Wayne, is to be able to detain about 93,000 immigrants all at the same time. And DHS has a lot of money right now to follow through on these big ambitions. Despite the shutdown over the agency's funding,

it got a big chunk of change from the so-called "big beautiful bill."

The administration plans to spend more than $38 billion of those funds

to build and expand its new detention facilities. They'll be located in big cities, but also in small towns. And you reported on one of them in Georgia. Can you tell us about what you found? Yes, so I want to take you to Fogston, Georgia.

It's a rural community of close to 5,000 people, mostly black, with about one third of the population leaving under the poverty line. It's also home to one of the largest icy tension facilities in the US. Glenn Hall was the administrator of Charlton County,

where Fogston is.

“And he is very blunt about why he thinks having the center”

could mean for his county. I won't put it in the words of quit pro quo, but we are supporting a major federal policy with this administration. And we need a hospital.

We need emergency medical care. We need dollars. He told me that as a county administrator, one of his jobs was to focus on jobs, you know, and creating them.

And this is an opportunity for that. What's now the ice facility used to be a state prison, but it closed. I mean, 2017, the geo group started running an immigration detention center out of it.

That's the private prison corporation, also in charge of the expansion of the facility. That's happening now with the new dollars. Now, this sounds like a story we've heard before. Small town that has no industries gets a lifeline

on the form of a prison or an immigration detention center. Right. And now, you drive by the Ice Detention Center in folks turn, and it's at least three city blocks, shiny barbed wires around the whole area.

And the parking lot is full of employee cars. Obviously, you can see the economic development that it has here. The impact that it has on our community, with all those jobs, and potentially more. Up until last year, the facility used to have 1100 beds.

But it's been expanded to hold up to 3000 people so far. This is brought about 200 new jobs with an hourly rate ranging from around $18 to about $50, with higher rates for physicians and dentists. The expansion of the facility is also giving the local county

and the city of folks turn about a million dollars.

This doesn't sound like a lot of money, especially after you compare it to the $96 million contract the geo group has with the feds. But for this area, that's a lifeline. I hate to say it, but if it's not here, it's somewhere else.

And so you take advantage of the stuff that you have at your table. And I hate to simplify it to that because these are people's lives and families. But that's the reality of it. When I visited Folkston, late last year, Glenn actually drove me and I produced her around the ice facility.

And as we were down, a side road by eight, a group of detainees were outside in our recreational area. And they got close to the fence and started shouting at us. Help. Hey, treating this good out here.

One of the men yelled, help. They aimed treating us good out here. I asked Glenn why he thought about hearing the men shouting these at us. If I was detained behind barb wire like that, I would be only helped, too, to somebody coming down a dirt road.

No doubt. I mean, that's the humanity side of this, right? He's clearly conflicted and many residents in the community are conflicted, too. Right, and it's interesting, Glenn, because for many residents, the detention center has been a place that could help them arrange some money.

“That's what Folkston natives of Ana Paula told me.”

I know for several of us, we just see it as just like a place that you could always get a job.

And that's really what it has been treated as. It's kind of, you know, if you didn't pursue college, and if you didn't go into a trade area or you're waiting or whatever, you know, the prison was always an option at that time. Of course, my prison, she's talking about that detention center.

And she says there's one big thing that attracts people to apply to work there. It offers benefits, you know, sometimes benefits are better than making money, sometimes, you know, when that you have insurance and knowing that your kids have insurance or your house. And that's one of the things that the GEO group offered to people here

was this promise of good benefits and of a decent wage, which a lot of people thought was a really good thing.

They got them enough in their pocket to go somewhere else.

“Still, Savannah is very much against the detention center.”

In fact, she's been advocating for it to shut down. Moreally, I don't think we should ever be tied to a system that hurts black and brown bodies. And not just that, a system that puts on a fake fake aid of criminality. These individuals haven't committed a crime. Savannah is studying medicine at Mercer University about two hours north of Fogston,

but all her family still lives in Fogston.

She says sometimes she feels like she's in the minority here,

“because she says having the time to think about them moreality of it all is a luxury.”

When you're in a poverty level, we're just thinking about how can I get money on my pocket. And that's where they bring up this, you know, we just don't have jobs conversation, but I say that this is just something you don't want to build your future upon, something that changes every four years.

She's talking about how immigration policy changes with each new president.

So the center might shut down within you administration. And that's something local leaders like Glenn Hall understand Glenn no longer works for Charlton County,

“but when I spoke to him late last year, he agreed that the county should not rely on the detention center in the long term.”

I'm hopeful that the prison will work itself out of a job. If this is the truth, that we close our borders and deport all the illegal immigrants. But that would be less jobs for the county. Absolutely would be. As of now, the Trump administration needs folks turn as well as the other communities,

saying yes to having an ice facility in their backyard up to 24 new facilities are being planned. There heo, thank you so much for bringing us the story today. You're welcome, thanks for inviting me. If you learned something from this episode, please send it to a friend who would get something out of it too. Word of mouth is how we grow.

So spreading the word is supporting our journalism. Or you can come see us live in person on our book tour in April. Check the link in the show notes to find out about tickets and dates. If you're in Chicago, I will see you there. Meanwhile, Kenny and Sarah Nick are on the west coast.

Each stop has storytelling, special guests and best of all a chance to meet you. Click the link in the show notes or go to planetmoneybook.com. The episodes of the Indicator were produced by Julia Richie with Engineering by Jimmy Keely. Their fact-checked by Sarah Waters can cannon is our show's editor. This episode of planetmoney was produced by Louis Gaia with help from James Sneed.

This edited by planetmoney's Executive Producer, Alex Goldmark. I'm Wayland Wong, this is MPR, thanks for listening. [Music]