By Rebecca Santana
Associated Press
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) — Immigration and Customs Enforcement is an agency inside the Department of Homeland Security that is integral to President Donald Trump’s vision of carrying out the mass deportations he promised during the campaign. Deportation officers within a unit called Enforcement and Removal Operations are the ones who are responsible for immigration enforcement. They find and remove people from the United States who aren’t American citizens and, for a variety of reasons, no longer can stay in the country.
Some might have gone through immigration court and a judge ordered them removed. Or they were arrested or convicted of certain crimes, or they’ve repeatedly entered the country illegally or overstayed a visa. ICE also manages a growing network of immigration detention facilities around the country where it holds people suspected of immigration violations.
Overall, its activities — and how it carries them out — have polarized many Americans in recent months.
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.
ICE is surging its hiring
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.
The agency has launched a new recruiting website, offered hiring bonuses as high as $50,000, and is advertising at career expos. Lyons said the agency has already received 121,000 applications — many from former officers.
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
As Trump’s effort to deport millions of people has intensified, violent episodes have unfolded as ICE seeks to arrest people. Critics have said ICE is being too heavy-handed in carrying out arrests while ICE says its people are the ones being attacked.
Vitello said the agency tracks every time officers use force as well as any time someone attacks its officers. According to the agency’s data, from Jan. 21 through Aug. 5 there were 121 reported assaults of ICE officers compared with 11 during the same period last year.
Lyons said that after recent operations in Los Angeles turned violent, ICE is making gas masks and helmets standard issue for new agents. “Right now we’re seeing and we’re having to adapt to all different scenarios that we were never trained for in the past,” he said.
Lyons says the agency is also starting to send out security teams to accompany agents making arrests: “We’re not gonna allow people to throw rocks anymore, because we’re going to have our own agents and officers there to protect the ones that are actually out there making that arrest.”
And it’s beefing up specialized units for risky situations
About eight deportation officers dressed in military-style camouflage uniforms, helmets and carrying an assortment of weapons stand outside a house yelling “Police! We have a warrant!” before entering and clearing the house.
They are members of a Special Response Team taking part in a demonstration at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. These officers are like a SWAT team — deportation officers with special training to assist in difficult situations. They also accompany detainees the agency deems dangerous when they are deported.
“Everybody is trained to serve a warrant,” Vitello said. “These guys are trained to serve high-risk warrants.”
There are roughly 450 deportation officers with the special training to serve on these teams, and Lyons says they have been deployed to assist with immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and Washington.
He said he’d like to have more such units but wouldn’t put an exact number on how many. Vitello said they’re also in the process of getting more of the specially armored vehicles.
ICE teaches whom agents can arrest — and when
New recruits to ICE receive training on immigration law and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful searches. Longtime officers get regular refreshers on these topics.
In limited situations, ICE agents are allowed to enter someone’s home. Generally when they’re seeking someone they’re trying to remove from the country, they have an administrative warrant as opposed to a criminal warrant. That administrative warrant doesn’t allow them to enter the house without first getting permission.
Vitello says the new recruits are taught about the different warrants and how the rules differ. And they’re taught how those who allowed ICE to enter their house can change their mind.
“If somebody says ‘Get out,’ and you don’t have your target, you have to leave,” he said.
Multiple videos on social media have shown ICE officers breaking car windows to pull someone out of a vehicle and arrest that person.
As ICE sees it, Vitello said, deportation officers do have the authority to arrest someone in a car or truck. Vitello said in the rare case where a target was in a motor home, officers would talk to the agency’s lawyers first to figure out what protections apply.
Advocates for immigrants and the government have often disagreed about how much authority ICE has to make those arrests and where.