US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is offering recruitment bonuses of up to $50,000 (£37,700) and student loan help to “brave and heroic” Americans interested in helping with the Trump administration’s deportation drive.
The agency is specifically hoping to recruit deportation officers, along with attorneys, criminal investigators, student visa adjudicators and other roles.
In total, ICE hopes to add 10,000 new personnel, doubling the agency’s headcount as it ramps up deportations across the country.
The funding for the recruitment drive comes from approximately $165bn allocated for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and spending bill.
As part of a new recruitment drive announced on 29 July, DHS unveiled recruitment posters akin to those used during World War Two, with the words “America Needs You” and “Defend the Homeland” with images of Uncle Sam, President Trump, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem and other officials.
“Your country is calling you to serve at ICE,” Noem said in a statement. “This is a defining moment in our nation’s history.”
In addition to the signing bonus and student loan repayment and forgiveness of up to $60,000, ICE is promising potentially hefty overtime pay for deportation officers and “enhanced retirement benefits”.
The students loans offer comes as millions of people signed up for a Biden-era relief payment plan will start seeing interest accrue to their accounts starting on Friday.
Deportation officers, who would be tasked with helping apprehend and process undocumented migrants for removal from the US, receive salaries of between $49,739 and $89,528 per year, depending on experience and education.
An image accompanying the job description for the role includes armed officers riding in an armoured vehicle.
ICE currently has 20,000 officers and support personnel, spread across the country at 400 offices.
The recruitment drive comes just weeks after President Trump signed the “One, Big, Beautiful” tax and spending bill into law.
The bill included more than $76bn allocated to ICE – almost 10 times of what it had been receiving previously – and making it the highest funded federal law enforcement agency.
President Trump, Secretary Noem and other administration officials have vowed to ramp up the pace of deportations to one million per year.
Approximately 150,000 people have been deported in the first six months of the Trump administration, according to data obtained by CBS, the BBC’s US news partner.
If that pace – of about 800 a day – continues, ICE will have carried more than 300,000 deportations in Trump’s first year in office, well below the administration’s self-imposed goal.
In an interview with the Associated Press, former ICE chief staff Jason Houser said that while the agency has long needed more staff, he is concerned that standards may fall amid the deportation drive, comparing it to the enlargement of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the early 2000s.
“If they start waiving requirements there like they did for Border Patrol, you’re going to have an exponential increase in officers that are shown the door after three years because there’s some issue,” he said.
It is unclear how many people have so far applied for the newly advertised jobs with ICE.
By BBC News
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