ICE Plans 5,000 More Hires as Background Check Backlog and Wasted Millions Pile Up

ICE wants 5,000 more employees on the payroll by the end of 2026. That's on top of the roughly 8,000 it has already added since President Trump took office, bringing total staffing to about 29,000 as of July, according to The New York Times and Yahoo News, both citing federal workforce data and people familiar with the plan.

Most of the new hires will be deportation officers, the ones who make arrests and carry out removals. If ICE fills every slot, that's a 17% jump in workforce. The agency says it received more than 220,000 applications during its recruiting surge.

Congress isn't skimping on cash. Lawmakers approved more than $100 billion for Trump's immigration priorities, with about $75 billion earmarked for ICE through fiscal 2029, including $45 billion specifically for detention capacity, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The Vetting Problem Nobody Fixed

Nearly 7,500 recent hires are still sitting in unfinished background investigations, according to two people familiar with the process cited by The New York Times. That means ICE is planning another hiring wave before it's finished checking the last one.

Deborah Fleischaker, a former acting ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, put it plainly: "Adequately vetting people takes time. It's more important to get it right than do it fast."

A complaint made public this month from a former supervisor in ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility alleges some recruits got final job offers last year before fingerprinting, identity verification, and credit checks were even completed. ICE says it follows personnel vetting rules and that some recruits began training while background checks continued. DHS's inspector general is now examining ICE's hiring practices. No charges or findings have been announced.

Rushed vetting has produced tangible consequences. The Daily Wire reported that David Brouillette, hired during the surge despite a documented history of alleged abuse and a childhood diagnosis of severe bipolar disorder, allegedly fatally shot a Colombian migrant in Biddeford, Maine in July. Current ICE officers, granted anonymity by the outlet because they aren't authorized to speak publicly, described newer recruits freezing during confrontations: "I'm counting on you to have my back, but I'm seeing all these pre-assault indicators, and you're just standing there," one officer said.

DHS has since extended academy training from a rushed 42 days back to 72 days, a change Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in June, effective July 1. The Washington Post has reported some officers hired in the earlier surge were later removed after performance problems or additional review, and the Daily Wire reports the agency is now quietly firing recruits whose background checks turned up red flags after the fact.

GAO Finds Tens of Millions Wasted

Speed has cost money too. A Government Accountability Office report, requested by congressional Democrats and covered by The Guardian, found ICE wasted tens of millions of dollars chasing rapid detention expansion with no comprehensive strategic plan.

Among the specifics: nearly $3 million spent erecting tents at Guantánamo Bay that were never used, and $20 million spent maintaining warehouses now being sold without ever holding a detainee. The report also flagged excessive per-detainee rates paid at the now-shuttered Florida facility known as "Alligator Alcatraz."

The detainee population has grown from 39,000 in January 2025 to 67,000 as of July 30, according to the GAO. DHS told investigators it would develop a formal spending plan by August 31, 2027, a timeline the GAO itself warned may be too late to stop further waste. DHS and ICE offered no additional comment on the findings.

Wasting taxpayer money while asking Congress for tens of billions more reflects a management failure. The GAO is a nonpartisan body, not an advocacy group.

A Weekend of Confusion Over What ICE Is Actually Doing

The hiring and spending questions landed the same week a rumor spread that ICE had been told to stop arresting non-violent illegal immigrants. DHS called it false just after midnight Saturday, and Fox News's Bill Melugin reported, after speaking with President Trump and nine ICE and DHS sources, that erroneous verbal guidance did in fact go out to some field offices, described to him as a miscommunication during discussions about prioritizing "worst first" cases. New guidance reaffirming no change in policy went out that same night, according to Melugin's sources.

Long-time GOP strategist Karl Rove argued at an event in Texas, as reported by Breitbart, that business pressure has pushed the administration to reduce enforcement against employers who rely on low-wage illegal labor, even as arrests continue at roughly 50,000 migrants a month. Whether that reflects a genuine policy shift or normal friction between enforcement priorities and political pressure from industry groups remains a matter of dispute between Trump's own team and outside critics like Rove. The record doesn't settle it either way.

What's confirmed: ICE is bigger, better funded, and moving faster than at any point in the administration's tenure. What's unresolved: whether the agency can screen thousands more recruits without repeating the mistakes that already cost a life in Maine, and whether Congress's $45 billion detention buildout gets the strategic plan the GAO says it still lacks, two years after lawmakers cut the check.