A reporter for Creative Loafing Tampa went to a Border Patrol recruitment event in St. Petersburg, Florida, and says she was rapidly and forcefully corralled into applying, barely with her consent, and used an artificial intelligence tool to generate her resume to expedite the process.
According to Valerie Smith, "My experience with Border Patrol felt like a military recruitment: it was an organized, systematic routine that took people in to process them and move on. By never saying 'no,' I was corralled from standing near the recruitment table to having a completed application submitted on my behalf, and I was told to expect a tentative job offer within weeks."
"I entered a large room that had about 78 workstations, each with a laptop open to an application page," she said. "Most seats were filled, and most of the applicants appeared to be either nonwhite Latino or Black men. The Border Patrol recruiter handed me off to a separate recruiter who was helping several people fill out their applications. I was instructed to create an account on usajobs.gov and wait for further assistance."
Once that account was created, she said, "the recruiter opened up an AI resume-generating website called livecareer.com," instructing her to erase the previous applicant's still-visible AI-generated description of being a nightclub bouncer.
"After entering my former job title, a menu appeared with about 65 suggested job responsibilities, like 'Mentored junior developers, sharing knowledge and expertise to support their professional growth and development within team.' When I clicked one, a bullet point was added to a 'job description' field containing that text. 'Click everything,' the recruiter said," Smith wrote. "I read each sentence, confirming that it was an actual part of the job that I completed, then I clicked it to add it to my job description. After I had added about five responsibilities, the recruiter reached over my shoulder to click all of them faster than either of us could read. 'According to America, as a software engineer, you did all these things,' he told me. 'You’re a rockstar.'"
American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick was gobsmacked at the report. "Incredible," he wrote on X. "Border Patrol is recruiting by having people enter AI-generated resumes and telling them so long as they've worked at a Walmart or a Walgreens for a few years they're qualified, and the recruiters just filling out everything for the applicants."
Border Patrol is a separate entity from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though the public and some news media reports often confuse their roles and President Donald Trump sometimes deploys them interchangeably. But ICE is reportedly having similar issues with rushed recruitment; applicants who should have been screened out early in the process are flunking basic fitness tests after already receiving preliminary job offers, forcing the agency to scramble to find other roles for them.
