ICE recruits former federal workers to join its ranks amid hiring spree

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is recruiting retired federal workers to join its enforcement, legal and investigative units as a part of a broader campaign to beef up hiring.

The requests came in an email, which was shared with NPR and posted on LinkedIn and elsewhere online, and asked them to “serve once more.”

“This is a pivotal moment in our country’s history, and your experience and expertise are vitally needed,” the email states, which includes a message on a new webpage.

“On behalf of a grateful nation, we proudly call upon you to RETURN TO MISSION and claim your vital role among the courageous men and women of ICE.”

The push to rehire retired workers comes as the administration has also sought to downsize large swaths of the federal government through mass layoffs and other changes to long-standing norms. Immigration enforcement agencies have been among the few to be exempt from the efforts to encourage employees to voluntarily resign and hiring freezes.

The Trump administration wants to recruit 10,000 people for immigration enforcement using new congressional funds approved last month, helping it meet a target of deporting 1 million people a year.

The government has already deported more than 185,000 people during Trump’s second term, a senior DHS official said in an email, but deportations are still unlikely to reach 1 million at the current pace.

Limited enforcement resources have been one of the biggest challenges to scaling up the pace of arrests, detentions and deportations.

The Department of Homeland Security’s hiring spree particularly focuses on ICE, which conducts arrests and deportations in the interior of the U.S.

Bonuses spread out over three years

The agency is offering former employees a $50,000 signing bonus, split up as $10,000 upon returning, $10,000 if applications are submitted before early August, and the rest as $10,000 annually for up to three years.

A “dual compensation waiver,” DHS said, will allow retired employees to continue to collect their new ICE salary while also retaining any existing federal benefits including pension payments.

The new hiring benefits, and the broader hiring campaign, come after lawmakers approved $76.5 billion for ICE last month, roughly 10 times its annual budget – with about $30 billion going specifically to hiring. The influx of cash sets the agency up to be one of the highest-funded federal law enforcement agencies; by comparison, the FBI requested about $10 billion for the next fiscal year.

But the new funds will also take time to kick in; they’re set to be allocated through 2029.

DHS said it was distributing recruitment materials across major cities, colleges, job fairs and other networks. But it postponed a previously scheduled career fair in Phoenix, Ariz.

ICE started the administration with a little over 20,000 employees, about 6,000 of whom were doing enforcement and removal work.

The agency on Thursday said it’s extended over 1,000 tentative job offers since July 4, without clarifying why they’re “tentative.” The offers included bringing back officers and agents who retired under the previous administration, according to a statement.

Growing ICE’s workforce is historically challenging

DHS has three immigration-focused agencies: Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and ICE.

ICE has historically been the smallest. That agency includes enforcement officers who make arrests, attorneys who prosecute cases in immigration court and investigators who look into crimes unrelated to immigration such as drug or human trafficking, cybercrimes, and fraud.

The Biden administration kept about the same number of employees at ICE from the first Trump administration, according to an NPR analysis.

Morale within ICE has also historically been low, with slight improvements in 2024, according to the Partnership for Public Service’s survey of best federal agencies to work for.

In its year-end report, ICE reported particularly struggling with growing its workforce over the past decade, and across administrations of both political parties.

Bonuses have previously helped boost recruitment for other parts of DHS.

During the Biden administration, CBP was able to recruit its workforce in part thanks to hiring bonuses, according to a Governmental Accountability Office report. Still, the agency struggled to significantly increase the overall number of applicants despite the incentives, a problem it also faced during the first Trump administration.

And while DHS focuses its recruitment efforts on enforcement, experts warn this could exacerbate the imbalance between how many people are processed for deportation, and how their cases are handled in the courts.

The current case backlog in immigration courts, for example, is nearly 4 million cases.