The Trump administration is hoping to use an unprecedented $75 billion infusion of funding into Immigration and Customs Enforcement to roughly double the number of active immigration agents to 10,000 by early next year, but scores of new hires are reportedly failing the agency’s physical fitness requirements, slowing a key part of the recruiting push.
With ICE now offering incentives like loan forgiveness and $50,000 bonuses, the agency has been flooded with more than 150,000 applications this year, but about a third of recruits at the agency’s academy have been unable to pass a basic fitness test requiring 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and running one-and-a-half miles in 14 minutes, The Atlantic reports, citing administration officials.
“It’s pathetic,” a career ICE official told the magazine, describing the requirements as the “minimum for any officer.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has said such troubled recruits only represent a small portion of its larger hiring pool, and that it expects to fill about 85 percent of new deportation officer positions with experienced law enforcement personnel who are put through a separate fast-track hiring process.
With Trump administration officials reportedly pushing behind the scenes for 3,000 immigration arrests per day, the White House has been going all out to expand ICE as quickly as possible to keep up, channeling $75 billion to the agency as part of this summer’s One Big, Beautiful Bill spending package, while eliminating requirements around Spanish-language proficiency and an age cap that mandated ICE recruits be older than 21 and younger than 40 to join the force.
Critics have warned that lowering standards during this mass hiring drive could open the door to further abuses that have already taken place during the Trump administration’s deportation push.
“The loosening of hiring standards and training requirements is unacceptable and will likely result in increased officer misconduct— similar to or worse than what occurred during a small surge in hiring U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in the early 2000s,” Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, wrote to Homeland Security Kristi Noem in a letter on Tuesday. “Exacerbating our concerns, DHS has gutted offices responsible for overseeing ICE officers and ensuring accountability for use-of-force incidents.”
The federal government has been struggling to find physically fit personnel to join the ranks since before Trump, though, with service branches like the Army and the Navy regularly failing to meet their recruiting goals.
One Pentagon study found that more than three-quarters of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 were ineligible for service because they were overweight, unable to pass an aptitude test, afflicted by physical or mental health issues, or ruled out by a criminal record.
Faced with these kinds of challenges, some service branches have relaxed certain recruiting rules or offered supplementary fitness programs for aspiring recruits.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth railed in an unusual September address to much of the senior military leadership that it was “unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals” because “it’s a bad look.”
The Secretary has required that those in combat roles meet the “highest male standard only” of their service’s fitness test, part of his push to restore what he calls a masculine “warrior ethos” to the Pentagon.
While some of these changes have been couched in strategic terms, the famously image-obsessed president and his administration also appear to view unfit soldiers as a PR liability.
Hegseth celebrated last week when a group of overweight Texas National Guard soldiers landing as part of the administration’s unilateral crackdown on Chicago were sent home, claiming, “Standards are back at the Department of War.”
