ICE Rushed to Hire 12,000 Agents With $50,000 Bonuses. Now It’s Quietly Firing Them.
Azucena Salazar, Latin Times, September 16, 2026
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The scramble traces back to a Fourth of July 2025 bill signing, when President Trump enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, freeing up billions of dollars earmarked for expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement from about 10,000 officers to 22,000. To hit that number, the agency slashed or waived weeks of basic training, dropped its 40-year age ceiling for applicants and staged large recruiting fairs nationwide. More than 220,000 people applied within months, pulled in partly by $50,000 signing bonuses — roughly what Moore had earned in an entire year at his last job. ICE extended offers to 12,000 of them, Moore among them.
That speed carried a price. A confidential memo reached federal watchdogs late that summer, written by an internal ICE official who supervised close to 100 background investigators. It warned that personnel staff were closing out job offers before fingerprint, identity and credit checks were finished, and pushed for a freeze on hiring until proper screening returned. Nothing changed, and the whistleblower stepped down this past July without seeing the surge slow. His attorney, Kevin Owen, put it bluntly: “The basic processes weren’t even followed.”
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One agent who walked away from the job this summer painted a picture of chaos on the ground: his regional post, somewhere in the South, went from onboarding a couple of new hires at a time to absorbing 60 in a single stretch across the winter, straining everything from cubicle space to restroom access.
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Nearly 30% of ICE’s workforce identifies as Latino, according to researchers at UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute — a striking share of an agency now cutting recruits loose from the inside while facing sharper scrutiny on the street. Eddie, a 33-year-old Texan of Mexican descent who signed up at an ICE job fair even as the agency was shortening its training, told wire service AFP that despite his own hesitations, “it’s a job that has to be done.”
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