The Trump administration may be struggling to meet its goal of hiring 10,000 new immigration officers after it was forced to admit Wednesday that a number of employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were reassigned to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
According to The American Prospect, which had spoken with multiple anonymous sources and obtained an internal DHS email, FEMA staff selected to be reassigned were those with less than one year of service, and under threat of termination, a move that Prospect reporter David Dayen wrote “could signal problems with ICE recruitment.”
“These probationary FEMA employees on leave are apparently being shifted as a stopgap maneuver to bolster the ranks of ICE, which received tens of billions of dollars in the GOP mega-bill but faces the daunting task of hiring thousands of new agents to an unpopular agency with plummeting morale,” Dayen wrote.
Plummeting morale has reportedly surged among ICE officers, many of whom cite the White House’s daily arrest quota of 3,000, daily pre-dawn raids, and the moral dilemma of targeting migrants without criminal histories as cause for their exhaustion. As of mid-July, around 65% of arrested migrants had no criminal history.
A DHS spokesperson was forced to admit the reassignments in a statement to The American Prospect, who told the publication the reassignments would only be temporary.
“Select FEMA employees will temporarily be detailed to ICE for 90 days to assist with hiring and vetting,” the spokesperson said. “FEMA remains fully prepared for Hurricane Season.”
President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill increased funding for ICE to the tune of $37.5 billion, making the agency’s budget higher than the military budgets of all but 15 countries, including the United States. Nevertheless, and despite generous incentives for new employees including sign-on bonuses as high as $50,000, Dayen argued that the DHS’ latest move was a clear sign that the agency was still struggling to meet hiring expectations.
“A rushed process to boost staffing levels by any means necessary is likely to lead to relaxed hiring standards and improper practices,” he wrote. “Already, American citizens have been detained and deported, numerous human rights violations have been alleged, and several detainees have died in custody.”