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[–] 209 points 1 month ago (18 children)

ICE has been quietly firing some of the roughly 12,000 officers it hired during its 2025 rapid expansion, citing background red flags that former DHS officials say should have been caught before hiring and because of poor performance.

A whistleblower told the DHS Office of Inspector General in August 2025 that final job offers were being issued before fingerprint, identity, and credit checks were completed, and that some recruits began training or duty while investigations were still open

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  • [–] 124 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    I shudder at the thought of what "poor performance" means at ICE. Not enough arrests? Not enough tasered people?

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  • [–] 68 points 1 month ago

    Probably more like tasering people while being filmed. As long as it's off camera it never happened.

    And as funny as it sounds, it's probably true. They have been told to be brutal, just don't end up on the evening news beside a dead body.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    In this admin poor performance could also mean not being harsh enough.

    There never was ask for competency, trump fires like for not being loyal enough.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    A few months ago, I asked Lemmy how much I could expect to make if I went through ICE training, and quit immediately before my first operational deployment. I'd bet I wasn't the only one to contemplate such a scam.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Probably paperwork issues that delay full depotions. I could see the courts full of wrongfully arrest lawsuits because there US citazen paperwork was available but not filed correctly. It comes with the arrest now ask questions later mentality.

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  • [–] 46 points 1 month ago*

    Not surprising given what we've seen reported: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-minneapolis-shooting.html

    spoiler/quoteSomehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.

    According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”

    I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”

    By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

    Perhaps, if I’d accepted, they would have demanded my pre-employment paperwork, done a basic screening, realized their mistake, and fired me immediately. And yet, the pending and upcoming tasks list suggested a very different outcome. My physical fitness test had been initiated on Oct. 6, it said: three days in the future. My medical check had apparently been completed on Oct. 6.

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  • [–] 52 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Please tell us you have a source for this, that is awesome

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  • [–] 51 points 1 month ago

    The source has already been posted, but I remember a journalist reporting that she applied to ice and they hired her immediately without doing any background research and after she had responded saying she had recanted her application

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  • [–] 182 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    Iirc many of the signing bonuses required a contract of 5 years.

    Which is conveniently 1 year longer than the president's term...

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  • [–] 58 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Stupids getting suckered and left holding the bag, not my problem.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    This is exactly to motivate those thugs so they do everything that trump stays in power after 2029.

    Not only they might need to pay 50,000 that they probably already spent, but might be also told that they will go to jail for doing what they were told to keep that 50k.

    I wouldn't be surprised that those fired ICE were fired, because they had issues with what they were told to do.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Eh, what you're implying is not how these things usually work. If the government side terminates your contract early, you keep the bonus. I've seen it in the military. People signed with bonuses that the government paid up front. Then while the member was in tech school his position got cut (Air National Guard), so they ended his contract but he kept the bonus because he wasn't the one that invalidated the contract. If it works the same and these ICE agents did get terminated by the next administration, they would still keep their bonus.

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  • [–] 157 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    This is objectively funny.

    Fuck every single one of them. I hope they are financially crippled from this and learn something important about trusting authoritarians.

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  • [–] 94 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    It's even funnier. The bonus was taxable, they paid not a little bit of it to tax right away. They don't get that refunded but they do still have to repay the 50K in full.

    In other words, trying to be a racist pieces of shit professionally was very expensive. As it should be.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I don't think that's how these people are wired.

    They're conditioned to blame others for their problems. They will just blame harder.

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  • [–] 88 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    Anyone who knows anything connected to Trump it’s that he always looks to screw everyone over, especially those most loyal to him. He loved to prove people are suckers, like he gets off on this.

    I hope this just increases the number of people that realize it, I don’t hope too hard, but I have hope…

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  • [–] 41 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Yep. His number one play is to promise things, usually payment, then never follow through. He should be an idiot who only got away with that once or twice. But apparently people are way too stupid to support that world. They'll fall for it endlessly.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    He was a useful idiot for laundering money.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Ding ding ding!

    And that's what taught him that as long as the money keeps moving, and the sums of moving money are big enough, the rewards always grossly outweigh the penalties. That fact has only grown more true and far-reaching, throughout his entire life.

    Folks miss the whole point, getting up in arms primarily about the policies and their way-too-real play-acting toward such, failing to see that this entire administration is strictly a gigantic, nakedly transparent, global-scale grift.

    It's vacuuming up WILD sums of money, moving them, knowing that any penalties can only come much later, AND must contend with the massively stacked deck that's built by moving those hideously big sums of money. There's a lot to say about the insane number of grift-streams they have openly established, way more than makes sense to do here, but fuuuuuuck holy fucking fuck.

    spoilerDon't get me wrong, on the idea of money being the bigger problem. The whole shebang is also rife with heinous malevolent creatures like Stephen Miller who care only about directed hate, not money. The grift is the bigger long-term "we're all more and more fucked, now...", but the actively constructed misery at present is itself beyond the fuckin pale and would need a thousand more words to address.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    No no, they were right to fire me. My testosterone levels were probably just not high enough. I'll try again next year! Maybe I can impress with my new golden sneakers and that gold watch ... 🤔

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  • [–] 70 points 1 month ago

    I think I speak for all of us when I say,

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHA

    HAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHA

    HAHAHA HA HA HA HA HA

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  • [–] 69 points 1 month ago

    This move is right out of the Trump business playbook. He's been not paying workers and committing fraud against contractors his entire adult life. Avoiding the payout was the plan from day 1 when the bonus was offered--I'm betting Trump himself recommended this outcome. Fuck ICE. I hope every agent experiences bankruptcy and hardship. They ruined their lives to serve a child-rapist.

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  • [–] 53 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Not only do these idiots get what they deserve, but it's also hilarious that Trump is scamming and turning his most hardcore supporters against him

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  • [–] 45 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    Tf you gotta do to get fired from ICE? Show compassion?

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  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago

    The department has been firing people that they found out they didn't pass their background checks now after they didn't do them in the first place. My guess is probably things like having previous arrests/convictions, DV, different aliases.

    But probably not things like being convicted for beastiality, those kids are alright according to Kash.

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  • [–] 129 points 1 month ago (1 child)
  • [–] 38 points 1 month ago
    [–] 34 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    What if you happened to have spent it all on new and exciting looksmaxing medical procedures?

    Asking for a friend.

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  • [–] 33 points 1 month ago (17 children)

    I take two things from this:

    1. The guys they are attracting are so incompetent that they can't make it through their probation period.
    2. They either are generally incompetent, or not savage enough. One of these is funny, and one of these is deeply concerning.
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  • [+] 42 points 1 month ago (9 children)
  • [–] 30 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    It's not a secret third thing.

    As soon as we heard that the signing bonus was related to a probationary period, everyone who knows anything about how Trump does business said, "Nobody is getting that bonus."

    It's extra shitty if they paid it out up front and now the employees have to pay it back, but none of this comes as a surprise.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    It's extra shitty if they paid it out up front

    It does, in fact, seem like that's the case

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    It's only the case because Trump is using taxpayer money and not from his pocket. If he had to personally pay the signing bonus they wouldn't get one even if it was promised. If Elon wanted DOGE to actually do it's job they would impeach Trump.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (1 child)

    As soon as we heard that the signing bonus was related to a probationary period, everyone who knows anything about how Trump does business said, “Nobody is getting that bonus.”

    This is a single instance posted with little to no detail in a thread that loves to promote any kind of rumor of a reactionary experiencing hardship.

    So, consider taking it with a boulder of salt.

    No source. No supporting details. It's just Lefty Forward From Grandma as far as I'm concerned.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    Just a few

    The bonuses are doled out over 5 years in $10,000 increments. Student loan forgiveness (who are we kidding... these guys didn't go to Yale) is similarly spread out. Both are at the discretion of supervisors.

    Basically, these imZmoral blobs are going to get screwed and I'm fine with that. https://bsky.app/profile/zuzuspetalsmi.bsky.social/post/3m3o62kdems2r

    Oh don’t worry they put a bunch of restrictions on those bonuses too, they’re not going to get them. It’s all just BS for recruiting.

    https://bsky.app/profile/zaclivinglife.bsky.social/post/3m3oflejyus2r

    I suspect that the signing bonus has a giant asterisk next to it and most of them are never actually going to see it.

    https://bsky.app/profile/cardboardrevolution.com/post/3m3ppilocac2f

    And the direct reply

    It literally has an asterisk next to it on the recruiting website.

    https://bsky.app/profile/bamamontana.bsky.social/post/3m3qze5fk5c2o

    To all ICE agents. He will be gone one day and you won't have Noem's skirts to hide behind. We are not going to forget and are going to demand Nuremburg style trials for you. Oh and that 50k signing bonus? Never going to see it

    https://bsky.app/profile/tjjohnson.bsky.social/post/3mcfrfg43yn2i

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    the cynic in me thinks it's more just that they have impossible quotas. since many of them are coming in with the idea that the country is bursting with illegals, they think they will reach those numbers easily but then find that no, actually like we've been telling you, they're mostly here legally. So they fail to make their numbers, are marked as poor performers and wash out. The smart ones would have put that signing bonus into a HYSA but I doubt their that clever.

    Could be a neat way to wash away student loans. Use the 50K to pay off student debt, Fail on purpose, declare bankruptcy to dismiss the signing bonus debt.

    Anyway, I don't think it has to do with their conduct or competency they got played using the old MLM scheme. can't deport illegals when all the illegals and even questionable have already been deported. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes as they like to say.

    edit:

    Don't get me wrong they're def pieces of shit, but a piece of shit with a major quota can be extra shitty because of stress. Like starving and beating a street dog. It's already prone to biting. you just made it snap faster.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Basically just like the Nazi Brownshirts when they outlived their usefulness.

    Now we just have to wait until they do something stupid and then get officially disbanded.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Well, what I want to know is, were these people fired because they weren't brownshirt enough? Then it's just cleaning ranks for the most loyal and extreme hires to come in. This is what it seems to be, since the people being fired are due to failed "background checks" or "poor performance".

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  • [–] 30 points 1 month ago

    Well the current admin did promise to cut down on costs and actually letting them keep their bonuses would be a huge cost.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Oh no, person who is notorious for not paying people finds excuses to not pay his Nazi secret police

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    I wonder at what point those people finally turn on him. Usually, failure to pay a group results in mutiny of some kind.

    Maybe they are so brainwashed that they believe whatever their superiors are saying to gaslight them about failing the probationary period.

    Or maybe DHS was smart enough to hire a bunch of people who didn't meet the criteria just so they could "finalize the background check" and fire them right when it was convenient.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    awww. poor babies just wanted to shoot brown people, and now they're getting fired?!

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    The craziest ones are the brown people that signed up

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    The best they could possibly do is lock down the wife and kids of the couch f*cker.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    That's the craziest part, all these sociopaths in power have immigrant wives or parents, with Trumplethinskin being the prime example.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    There's good immigrants ans bad immigrants.

    The good one are rich enough or protected by people in power till they stop please them.

    The bad one are everyone else. But hey.... The neat part is we include the white one.

    DEI Racism

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  • [–] 23 points 1 month ago
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