ICE is carrying out a recruitment mobilization. It is offering signing bonuses up to $50,000, removing age limits, and forgiving student loans for new hires.
The administration is hiring thousands of new agents at a pace comparable to a wartime mobilization. The question of filling ICE’s ranks is not even in doubt — it will happen inevitably. The real question is why America suddenly needs an army of deportation officers at a moment when illegal border crossings have already declined so steeply.
The scale of recruitment is striking. According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE is taking on thousands of new employees, with hundreds of millions set aside just for bonuses. Even the U.S. Army cannot compete, since its signing bonuses rarely exceed $20,000.
In fact, ICE is becoming a “super employer”, offering benefits, high salaries and quick hiring without bureaucracy. This creates the effect that deportation work appears to be more attractive than service in the police or the military, where such privileges do not exist.
From January to June 2025, the number of illegal crossings plummeted compared to the same period last year. This shows it is not a real crisis but a deliberately planned expansion of the apparatus, turning mass deportation of already-entered illegal immigrants into a part of the federal government’s long-term routine.
Such growth makes ICE a tool of domestic politics, using more agents to create pressure and to show voters a picture of “tough control.” In Republican states such as Texas and Florida, the strengthening the border and alien removal are presented as victories.
This expansion only reinforces the image of an “internal army” that works in an intensified mode, even without crisis conditions.
Mass expansion of ICE also carries a price that all Americans will pay. Millions are going to bonuses and benefits, while problems with health care and infrastructure remain frozen. The move turns a bureaucratic agency into a fourth branch of force, where new agents will be forced to justify their existence by keeping the perpetual conveyor belt of deportations turning.
At the moment of its creation in 2003 for the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, ICE was designed as a tool of crisis management. It was focused on targeted work against real threats — not intended to become a body of permanent pressure. Today, we see its growth into an organization of unnecessary size.
This current recruitment represents a transition into ICE as a permanent deportation machine. When new deportation officers are promised more than soldiers in the army, the government’s real priorities are demonstrated. Unfortunately, the field of deportation is now more in demand than medicine or education.
The mass-hiring is another demonstration of force, smoothly pushing power away from civilian regulation and toward military-style control.
Artem Kolisnichenko writes on crime, immigration, and border policy across the American South and Southwest.
