A Former ICE Official Is Worried That the Agency Is About to Go on a Hiring Spree of Proud Boys

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In the 22 years since Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created to identify and eliminate border security threats, Congress has again and again failed to reform the badly broken immigration system that ICE polices. That failure has fostered a culture of grievance at ICE and its sister agencies, and Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration position has only indulged that siege mentality. Now, in an effort to push agents to achieve his mass deportation agenda, Trump has granted the agency a massive, record-breaking cash infusion, while in the same stroke, he eliminated the oversight bodies that are supposed to regulate ICE’s actions. One former top ICE official says that there’s a worryingly real possibility that the incoming agents will be seeded from “Proud Boys and other insurrectionists.” Whether or not that nightmare scenario is realized, the results of Trump’s agent expansion and oversight contraction will likely spell disaster for civil liberties across the country.

Since its inception in 2002, ICE has become the second-largest investigative agency in the federal government, and today it has about 21,000 employees and an annual budget of $8 billion. For years, ICE has been accused of using problematic tactics when enforcing immigration law, a trend that has skyrocketed since Trump took office again this year. By March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had announced that the three oversight divisions within DHS were effectively shutting down: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. These were established by Congress as a way to implement oversight of DHS and focused on protecting detainees’ civil rights and ensuring they were receiving immigration-related benefits. Noem fired a majority of their staff by claiming their work was creating “roadblocks” to immigration enforcement.

The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group sued, forcing the oversight bodies to remain open, though key positions are either empty or being held by Trump-aligned figures—Troup Hemenway, a former leader on Project 2025, was appointed acting officer for the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Meanwhile, the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill awarded ICE $29.9 billion for enforcement and deportation operations—a threefold increase of their current annual budget. Even more funding will be provided to hire 10,000 new immigration enforcement agents, intended to push “the rate of deportations to reach as high as 1 million per year,” Noem announced. All in all, DHS, which oversees ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Customs and Border Protection, secured $165 billion in the new legislation.

Scott Shuchart, former assistant director of ICE under the Biden administration, does not believe the agency is capable of spending this money responsibly. “This administration is led by criminals, and they’re going to keep doing unlawful and terrible things,” he told me. It’s hard to keep track of just how unprecedented, expansive, and legally questionable the Trump administration’s push on immigration enforcement has been, from arresting immigrants at courthouses and revoking legal status from hundreds of thousands of people to targeting birthright citizenship. It’s led to a massive wave of lawsuits, which the federal government is mostly losing.

ICE is largely the face of these actions, with about 9,000 people working under Enforcement and Removal Operations, which are the officers tasked with enforcing civil interior immigration law. They go into local communities, identify immigrants being targeted by the administration, and then go on to arrest and detain them. Since Trump took office, these officers have been wearing masks to obscure their identities as they arrest people, inciting widespread fear and confusion across American communities. Some states have pushed back by introducing legislation that would ban law enforcement from wearing masks or a personal disguise while performing their duties. A group of detainees also filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration arguing that masks enable ICE to flout the Constitution and federal law.

The OBBB has appropriated funding to double this department to 20,000, which Shuchart is certain will drastically change the agency’s culture. “I’m very worried that they are going to be Proud Boys and other insurrectionists and hoodlums,” Shuchart said. “What self-respecting person who wants a meaningful career in law enforcement would go to work at the ERO right now, knowing the way ERO comports itself?” Hiring ERO officers typically takes months, as applicants must go through a security clearance process and then spend time at a training academy. Shuchart explained that Border Patrol officers traditionally make up a large share of ERO officers, since that unit is considered an entry path into federal law enforcement and hires younger applicants with less experience.

From his time at ICE, Shuchart said ERO’s culture was already one of grievance and self-pity. The job was considered difficult; they canvass the entire country for immigrants who are here without legal status, and do so with too few resources. They resent sanctuary cities, which are local jurisdictions that don’t work with federal immigration efforts, feeling that they put ICE in danger and made their job harder. And if there was a death of a migrant in a detention center, it was “rarely anyone’s fault,” said Shuchart, with officers blaming the detention center’s conditions on inadequate funding.

During Trump’s first term, ProPublica discovered a Facebook group made up of employees of CBP in which participants, including a CBP supervisor, made sexualized posts about members of Congress and used degrading language to describe migrants. Since Trump took office, the culture has further shifted, with officers working around the clock under pressure to meet impossibly high arrest quotas. One career ICE official told the Atlantic: “It’s miserable.”

The toxicity is spreading to local law enforcement, as federal agents raid their communities completely masked and unidentifiable, which ends up eroding residents’ trust in the police.

However, the Trump administration’s approach to immigration, manipulating existing laws and often straight-up violating them, is not exactly new. Disturbing reports of abuse at immigration detention centers surfaced under the Biden administration, problematic family detention tactics were used by the Obama administration, and Trump’s first administration pursued a notorious zero-tolerance policy that resulted in thousands of parents being deported while their children remained in the U.S. “Our system makes no sense whatsoever and serves nobody’s interests,” Shuchart said. “The only thing that’s ever going to work is legislation.”

Shuchart believes the Trump administration’s solution, which has thus far included firing staff, eliminating guardrails, and throwing billions more dollars at an overwhelmed agency so it can meet the president’s mass deportation goal as quickly as possible, is pure fantasy. The situation facing DHS and all the agencies it oversees is begging for a policy intervention that outlines real leadership and a plan, something money cannot buy.

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