Four ways ICE is training new agents and scaling up

Sunday, August 24, 2025

After years when the number of deportation officers largely remained even, the agency is now rapidly hiring. Congress this summer passed legislation giving ICE $76.5 billion in new money to help speed up the pace of deportations. That's nearly 10 times the agency's current annual budget. Nearly $30 billion is for new staff. Last week, The Associated Press got a chance to visit the base in southern Georgia where new ICE recruits are trained and to talk to the agency's top leadership. Here are details about four things ICE is doing that came out of those conversations.

Posted by LampLighter at 01:12 PM | 1 COMMENT | permalink

Comments

More from the article ...

... ICE currently has about 6,500 deportation officers, and it is aggressively looking to beef up those numbers. Acting Director Todd Lyons says he wants to hire an additional 10,000 by year's end. ...

New recruits are trained at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia. That's a sprawling facility near the coast where federal law enforcement officers " not just ICE agents " from around the country live and train. ICE is looking to more than double the number of instructors who train deportation officers.

Caleb Vitello, who runs training for ICE, says it has cut Spanish-language requirements to reduce training by five weeks, and he's been looking for ways to streamline the training and have recruits do more at the field offices where they're assigned.

ICE is also preparing for conflict ...

#1 | Posted by LampLighter at 2025-08-24 01:14 PM