Democrats aren’t the only ones celebrating their historic midterm victory earlier this week.
According to journalist Anna Giaritelli of the conservative Washington Examiner, among those celebrating Republicans’ electoral defeat are officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Plenty of officers who are working the line are happy with the election results,” reads a text message from a “tenured ICE source” shared by Giaritelli. “They want complete accountability of the agency (from the local management level to HQ) and hope this will move toward a transformation of the agency. And many of us hope there will be a renewed push for unionization.”
To carry out its mass deportations, the Trump administration launched an ICE hiring blitz last year, increasing the agency’s numbers by 120% within 12 months and adding more than 12,000 officers and agents. In its rush, however, ICE hired a number of undertrained and “sketchy” recruits, according to reporting from journalist Ken Klippenstein. One senior ICE agent said most of the fresh recruits were “idiots.”
“This source and others have lamented to me that the new hires have inadequate training and being assigned to the field with rookies is a liability for experienced officers,” Giaritelli wrote.
Giaritelli continued in a follow-up post: “MAGA automatically labels any ICE officer who speaks out as a leftist. They cannot comprehend that a Republican or pro-Trump federal [law enforcement officer] would be more committed to the law and how enforcement is supposed to occur than blindly going after people as MAGA wants to see.”
Immigration policy expert David J. Bier of the Cato Institute corroborated Giaritelli’s claim, telling his more than 93,000 followers on X that “many ICE agents are happy with the election results.”