Donald Trump’s administration is urgently trying to launch an ad campaign to help recruit more than 14,000 immigration officers who can rapidly remove people from the country, government documents say.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement specifically wants to target “Gen Z and early-career professionals,” as well as former law enforcement officers, military veterans and people from legal fields, according to the agency’s request for information, the first step in a government procurement process to begin contracting with eligible firms.
ICE wants to reach more than 42 million people in those “target audience groups” across social media platforms as well as through ads on Hulu, HBO Max and Amazon Prime, among other networks, the pitch says.
“This is a critical priority,” the agency wrote on the government’s procurement website. “ICE has an immediate need to begin recruitment efforts and requires specialized commercial advertising experience, established infrastructure, and qualified personnel to activate without delay.”
Marketing firms should be able to zero in on potential recruits through “geofencing,” which delivers ads based on a viewer’s location, as well as “behavioral” practices, according to the documents, first reported by 404 Media.
The effort ties together with the Trump administration’s “national launch and awareness saturation initiative aimed at dominating both digital and traditional media channels with urgent, compelling recruitment messages,” according to the pitch.
The Independent has requested comment from ICE.
Republicans in Congress earmarked $30 billion for the hiring spree, alongside $45 billion in new funding for ICE detention centers. Altogether, Trump’s “big, beautiful” domestic policy bill sets aside more than $170 billion for immigration enforcement over the next decade.
That injection of taxpayer cash makes the law enforcement agency one of the most expensive police forces in the world, outpacing most foreign military budgets.
Homeland Security is also advertising a “maximum $50,000 signing bonus” and student loan forgiveness for new recruits.
Secretary Kristi Noem announced Wednesday that she is dropping age limit requirements and allowing people older than 40 to apply, “so even more patriots will qualify to join ICE in its mission to arrest murderers, pedophiles, gang members, rapists, and other criminal illegal aliens from America’s streets,” according to DHS.
And people as young as 18 years old can apply, Noem told Fox News Wednesday.
ICE is looking to hire more removal officers, Homeland Security Investigations agents, attorneys and other personnel.
The pace of daily immigration arrests fell by nearly 20 percent in July following a wave of court challenges, mass protests, and reports suggesting that morale within ICE ranks has been plummeting with officers spending more time “arresting gardeners” than investigating major crimes.
“It’s miserable,” one ICE official told The Atlantic last month.
“It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” added Adam Boyd, an attorney who resigned from the agency’s legal department in June.
In May, White House adviser Stephen Miller announced on Fox News that the administration had set a goal of arresting 3,000 people a day, and that Trump “is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day.”
But in court filings, government lawyers have denied any such arrest targets.
ICE has not been directed to “meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law,” they wrote to a federal appeals court last week.
Between July 1 and 27, ICE averaged 990 daily arrests, down from 1,224 the previous month, according to government data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research project at Syracuse University.
ICE is likely to face significant roadblocks in reaching 14,000 new recruits, according to analysts and former law enforcement officials.
Without effective guardrails to screen how those agents are hired and who exactly is filling those roles, the government may be setting itself up to repeat critical past mistakes the last time there was a surge in new recruits, experts said.
But the agency is growing at such a rate that “we're going to see an ICE that it is going to be hard for any future administration to shrink,” former acting ICE director Josh Sandweg said earlier this year.
The agency’s “capacity to deport will certainly be at the highest level it's ever been in the history of the United States,” he added.
