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Yes it is an alarmist image. It was released by Trump's administration to be that.
From that AP item Yahoo carried:
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.
It's surging 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.
It's 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.
Nothing heavy handed in that opening report image. They carry light arms, shotguns and long guns. Continuing:
[...]
It's beefing up specialized units for high-risk 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.
It's teaching 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.
That lead image suggests if not a practice run, then the officers had a court order, or thought they had one.
So - JUST DON'T OPEN THE DOOR IF THEY SHOW UP. THEY WILL KICK IT IN IF THEY'VE A COURT ORDER. THEY WILL - IF ACTING PROPERLY - STAND THERE AT THE DOOR FRUSTRATED IF THEIR PIECE OF PAPER IS AN ADMINISTRATIVE WARRANT, ONE THAT AN ICE AGENT HANDS ANOTHER, AND THEN THE TEAM CAN GO ROCK AND ROLL.
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Back to the story, Politico -
Wartime-like recruitment posters. Sign-on bonuses of up to $50,000. Massive hiring events. Reduced age requirements. Superman.
It’s all been part of the Trump administration’s campaign to attract new applicants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And so far, it’s brought in more than 110,000 applications, ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan said in an interview with POLITICO. Thirty percent of applicants are military veterans, and roughly 10 percent are coming from other federal law enforcement agencies, Sheahan said.
The administration’s targeting of law enforcement recruits comes amid fears from Democrats and immigration advocates that the Trump administration is going to rely on unqualified recruits to quickly fill the 10,000 new ICE agent jobs they got out of the GOP’s megabill.
“This is the first time ICE has ever had a major plus up. So the beauty of that is that we can learn from the best practices of other agencies,” Sheahan said. “That huge presence that we’re seeing from former military and former federal law enforcement — those are people that have been vetted their entire career and have done great work for this country their entire career. And so having them a part of our ranks is really going to be helpful when it comes to a lot of the criticism that we’re getting right now.”
[...] “We have an opportunity to do this throughout the president’s entire term, and we’ll continue to do that until our ranks are filled,” Sheahan said. “Obviously, the pressure is on nationwide for us to serve the American people, and so we want to make sure we deliver for them.”
[...] The criticism facing the agency has reached a fever pitch in recent months, as Democrats, immigration advocates and lawyers decry everything from the masking of agents to ICE’s aggressive tactics to increase arrest numbers — with a number of polls showing the agency’s decreasing popularity among Americans. A July Quinnipiac University poll found that 57 percent of voters disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration law, while another from CNN that same month showed that 53 percent of Americans opposed increasing ICE’s budget by billions of dollars.
[...] “The last thing you want is somebody who has no law enforcement experience whatsoever and is gung ho about working for ICE under Trump,” said Scott Shuchart, a former senior ICE official during the Biden administration. “That’s the worst of all worlds.”
[...] “We’re trying to be judicious. We’re background checking people. We’re not taking crazies,” said a Trump administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “There’s this myth out there that we’re just taking everybody, and we decline a lot of positions.”
Yes. Those in the opening image, we want fingers along the trigger guard, not on the trigger. Beyond that, can you tell the one man of that image bunch who is injudicious? I cannot either. They all look dressed for combat. And you do that job, be masked, as it's the style.
Calling it a job don't make it right.
The new recruitment page on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s website shows a drawing of a white-bearded Uncle Sam pointing to the viewer. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators,” the page reads. “We need YOU to get them out.” The pitch emphasizes that a college degree isn’t needed, and says recruits could be offered up to a $50,000 signing bonus and $60,000 in student loan repayment.
The offers are part of a supercharged recruitment campaign that will take years to meet its goal. Republicans in Congress just allocated $30 billion to ICE to hire 10,000 new officers so it can ramp up deportations.
But the Administration’s interest in boosting ICE’s headcount from 20,000 to 30,000 is bumping up against multiple challenges, including finding applicants who are both qualified and willing to live in parts of the country where ICE is intent on deploying more agents.
“You’re talking three years before you see a significant increase of ICE agents on the street, which is the end of the administration,” predicts John Sandweg, who was the acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.
To spread the word, ICE is attending job fairs, college campuses and law enforcement recruiting events. Last week, Dean Cain, the 59-year-old actor who played Superman on TV in the 1990s, put his fame behind the recruitment effort, posting a video on X that he had signed up with ICE as an honorary officer. “I felt it was important to join with our first responders to help secure the safety of all Americans, not just talk about it. So I joined up.”
ICE’s stepped-up recruitment effort comes as deportation and arrests are not keeping pace with the Administration’s goals of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day and deporting 1 million people in Trump’s first year in office.
In the first week of its new recruitment campaign, the Department of Homeland Security said it received more than 80,000 applications. There are signs that most of those applicants were not what the agency was looking for. Within days, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that ICE was waiving its age limits for agents, accepting applicants as young as 18 and older than 40. Previously, people applying to ICE could not be younger than 21, and no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position.
Trump’s top White House advisor on the border, Tom Homan, told reporters on Aug. 6 that ICE wasn't having trouble recruiting, and he defended the decision to eliminate the age limits. “There are a lot of roles at ICE for people who are over 40,” Homan said. “Just because someone comes in and they’re 55—maybe they can’t carry a badge and a gun, they can certainly do administrative duty, they can do targeting on the intelligence team.”
Last, this from ABC should reassure you showing what? Administrative duty? -
Eight weeks? And turned loose? With a Glock and a purpose?
An interesting thing in this reporting sampling, all those facilities, Down South.
As to Crabgrass thinking, Noem and Homan; great human beings, right? Beyond that the job of breaking up families and ending established community ties, because Stephen Miller does not like "them" and wants "them" out of the nation ASAP. Trump too. And what, all those new detention sites, don't they have airplanes enough to avoid a backup?
Seriously, it is blowback time, and regular citizens with feelings of decency are questioning the Trump - Miller - Homan - Noem staged hatred of "others" as far-fetched; and error-prone absent good judgment.
It is not something I'd do short of being enslaved into such duty. They don't have a draft anymore, and need volunteers for the military too. You? Has your application been sent in and on file?
We've a nation of what, three hundred million, and how many apply? What's that as a percentage?
Apply to go to gladiator school? Be the one who shoots first, body count later? Is that you?
It is ugly already and due to get uglier. On the sidewalks outside the Home Depot stores, or at the fields of lettuce or melons ripe for harvest. At the meat packing plants. At English as a foreign language schools.
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@Julianna9845
5 days ago (edited)