“This Is the Mission”: ICE Gears Up for Its Biggest Hiring Wave Yet

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing for its next big expansion. The agency plans to bring on 5,000 more employees by the end of the year, according to people familiar with the plan.

The hiring would grow ICE’s workforce by roughly 17 percent. The agency had about 29,000 employees in July, which already represents an increase of around 8,000 since President Trump returned to office.

Most of the new recruits are expected to be deportation officers, the men and women who make arrests, manage cases, and carry out removals. They are the front line of the immigration promise Trump made to voters.

The push comes amid a stretch of record arrest numbers, which have been reported for four straight months. An agency running at that pace needs more people, and the people it has are stretched thin.

Existing officers have been under pressure to work seven days a week. Some personnel from other roles have been reassigned to immigration enforcement just to keep pace.

Adding 5,000 officers is meant to relieve that strain. Anyone who has worked a seven-day week for months knows exhaustion is a risk to everyone, including the public.

The money is already there. Congress provided more than $100 billion for the administration’s broader immigration priorities last year, including around $30 billion for ICE operations that covers the hiring and training of up to 10,000 new federal officers.

Homeland Security officials say the new positions come from that congressional funding and are separate from replacing employees who have left. That distinction matters because attrition is real.

More than 3,000 employees left ICE in the first half of 2026, counting firings, resignations, and retirements. Nearly 12,000 full-time employees were hired between January 2025 and June 2026.

Demand for the jobs has been enormous. ICE has reported more than 220,000 applications, which suggests plenty of Americans want to serve in the effort.

Recruiting has been aggressive. DHS has committed more than $100 million to what officials describe as a wartime recruitment push, with outreach aimed at military enthusiasts and gun-rights supporters, and signing bonuses of up to $50,000 for some recruits.

Critics have seized on the speed of the first hiring surge. They point to reports of shortened training and background check backlogs, and they argue that rapid growth risks bad hires.

The department says it intends to maintain rigorous standards, and it has acted on the problem. By spring, hundreds of recruits from the earlier surge had been removed, a sign that the agency is willing to correct mistakes rather than ignore them.

That is exactly what taxpayers should want. Removing unqualified hires quickly is not a scandal, it is accountability.

The context is simple. Donald Trump ran on the largest deportation operation in American history, won the election, and Congress funded the plan. Building the workforce to carry it out is not mission creep. It is the mission.

Officials have talked about targets as high as 3,000 arrests a day and 1 million removals a year. Those numbers cannot be reached by an agency that stays the size it was in 2024.

The administration points to criminals as the priority, and it regularly highlights arrests of violent offenders. Supporters say a larger force means more of them off the streets.