President Donald Trump's administration is grappling with an embarrassing setback in their plans for a recruitment surge of deportation officers, reported The Atlantic on Monday: tons of the people applying can't do the basic fitness test.
"More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes," reported Nick Miroff. "'It’s pathetic,' one career [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] official told me, adding that before now, a typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous."
Now, because Trump officials have signficantly eased the hiring process, many people who cannot do even light exercise are getting job offers that may have to be revoked or altered once they get to the training facility, said the report: "An email from ICE headquarters to the agency’s top officials on October 5 lamented that 'a considerable amount of athletically allergic candidates' had been showing up to the academy; they had 'misrepresented' their physical condition on application forms. The email directed leaders at ICE’s field offices to conduct preliminary fitness exams with new recruits before sending them to the academy."
These kinds of fitness tests are necessary because ICE officers, particularly under Trump's policies, frequently have to chase down and physically overpower suspects.
The big problem, the report noted, is that the people failing these tests have already gotten job offers.
"ICE’s field-office directors can try to rotate those candidates to an administrative job or another position with lower fitness standards. But with so many candidates failing, the directors have had to seek guidance from ICE’s legal department as to whether to revoke job offers. The attorneys told them to cut loose new hires who fail if they aren’t fit for other openings at ICE. But they have to assign them administrative tasks to perform while waiting for ICE’s human resources to issue termination letters. 'It’s a disaster,' one senior ICE official told me."
This comes a week after it was reported that the Pentagon's new height and weight requirements led to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sending National Guardsmen Trump deployed from Texas to Chicago back home because they were too fat.