“Are you ready to defend the homeland?” “AMERICA NEEDS YOU.” These are some of the latest appeals in a months-long, multi-million-dollar recruitment campaign by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire thousands of new agents and support staff to accelerate deportations nationwide.

As of September, the blitz seemed to be working — the agency reported some 150,000 applications from prospective agents. Some new recruits are recent college grads. Others are looking to change careers. But one group of people has emerged as both controversial and the most coveted potential new ICE agents: law enforcement officers already working for city and state agencies.

Several police chiefs and sheriffs have accused the federal agency of trying to poach their officers after ICE officials emailed them offering cash incentives to leave their jobs in places like Florida and New Hampshire.

Some of the emails from ICE appear to be specifically targeting people from agencies that have already agreed to deputize officers as part-time federal agents to help find and detain undocumented immigrants.

“Someone in Washington needs to lose their jobs over this, because this is ridiculous,” Florida’s Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said in August of the recruiting emails, which came less than two months after Ivey vowed to shoot people ”graveyard dead” in defense of ICE officers.

Other Florida Sheriffs, including Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood, shared similar sentiments with reporters over the summer, stating that ICE officials used the data the sheriffs had freely shared to target their officers with ICE's multi-million-dollar recruitment campaign.

The federal government is also targeting recruits from police forces in so-called sanctuary cities. In Atlanta, the feds spent nearly $1 million in a single week on an advertising campaign designed to lure local law enforcement away from departments where ICE says the officers are “ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals” roam free.

The federal blitz is making it harder for local and state police agencies to recruit and retain sworn officers, a problem that has plagued law enforcement since before the COVID pandemic, and is exacerbated by ICE's multi-million-dollar recruitment campaign. Three years ago, my then-colleague Weihua Li and I chronicled how the ongoing exodus from policing was part of an overall trend of people dropping government jobs for entrepreneurship or more lucrative jobs in the private sector.

Read the full article about ICE's recruitment drive by Daphne Duret at The Marshall Project.