My Career Opportunities With ICE
Uncle Sam wants to hire me to get rid of the worst of the worst.
FIRST OF ALL, I’D LIKE TO THANK Kristi Noem for making it possible for me to apply for a job with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one of the agencies under her purview as secretary of homeland security.
On August 6, Noem announced that she was waiving the age limit for new applicants “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.”
Previously, applicants for the job of deportation officer could not be older than 40 years old or younger than 21. Now anyone 18 or over is welcome to join the ranks of those now rounding up brown-skinned people from immigration hearings, farm fields, and Home Depot parking lots, ripping apart families and traumatizing millions of children.
I just turned 66, and I hate to be excluded from anything.
The change, which Noem said was needed to remove “the worst of the worst,” is part of the Trump administration’s plan to recruit 10,000 new ICE agents to step up the pace of mass deportation. The huge ramp-up in funding for ICE—of the whopping $76.5 billion promised to ICE in the spending bill Congress passed last month, about $30 billion is going to hiring—will pay for signing bonuses and other incentives, as well as for recruitment campaigns that are already in full swing.
One ICE recruitment ad shows Uncle Sam—copied from the famous James Montgomery Flagg illustration for a 1917 Army recruitment poster—pointing directly at me, above a banner headline that says, “AMERICA NEEDS YOU.”
The fine print reads: “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.” The ad goes on to say that applicants need not have an undergraduate degree and are eligible for a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment. That’s great, because a lot of older people like me are still paying off their student loans.
Of course I support Noem’s call to expel the “murderers, pedophiles, gang members, rapists, and other criminal illegal aliens” who have invaded our streets. Who wouldn’t? I can just imagine myself showing up at workplaces, courthouses, churches, and schools, and helping put an end to the mayhem.
“Hey you, stop that raping and murdering, and come with me,” I’d tell them. To others I’d say: “Enough with the pedophilia.” And when we were raiding, say, a child-care center, I’d have the satisfaction of knowing that the people we were rounding up were gang members, no matter how small and frightened they seemed.
In June, Border Patrol agents—not ICE, exactly, but close—apprehended Narciso Barranco, a 48-year-old man in Santa Ana, California. They chased him down, pepper-sprayed him, threw him to the ground, and punched him repeatedly in the head as he cried out in pain. Was it for raping, murdering, pedophilia, or gang activity?
None of the above. The guy is a landscaper! He was doing some work outside of an IHOP. He’s been in the United States since the 1990s and three of his sons are Marines, two of them on active duty. Although Noem’s DHS claimed Barranco “swung a weed whacker” at one of the heavily armed masked men who accosted him, it’s apparent from the video that he was not a danger to anyone.
Neither was Yeonsoo Go, a 20-year-old South Korean student at Purdue University, whose mother is a well-known and respected Episcopal priest. In late July, ICE agents arrested Go when she showed up at an immigration hearing to get her R-2 visa for the dependents of religious workers converted into a student visa, a perfectly legal thing to do. The agents claimed she had overstayed her current visa, but in fact it does not expire until December. Nonetheless, Go was thrown into detention for five days, before public outrage forced her release.
Cases like these are the norm and not the exception. Through late June, according to the Cato Institute, 65 percent of the more than 200,000 people arrested by ICE since October 2024, the start of the current fiscal year, had no criminal history, and most of those who did were for minor offenses.
This is frankly excellent news for people like me contemplating careers as immigration enforcers. Murders and rapists and gang members are dangerous. Pedophiles are also bad, although not everyone seems to have a huge problem with them. If I am going to put my 66-year-old ass on the line rounding up people to be packed into detention centers surrounded by alligators, awaiting deportation to places they have never been, without any sort of due process, I’d much rather they not be hardened criminals. Otherwise, I might get hurt.
Anyway, I decided to look into what the government was offering.
THE “AMERICA NEEDS YOU” AD invites applicants to “CHOOSE YOUR MISSION” and gives three options: Deportation Officer, Criminal Investigator, and General Attorney. You can click on any of these options to learn more.
The portal for Criminal Investigator consists of two tracks. One is for existing federal employees, veterans, and other categories I don’t fall into; it pays between $63,148 to $144,031 per year. The other is for ordinary members of the public, like me. The pay range here is $63,148 to $101,860 per year. Among the job duties: “Use electronic surveillance, interviews, polygraph examination, and physical surveillance to obtain evidence in investigative cases” and “Make arrests, confront multiple suspects, and secure scenes sometimes under potentially dangerous and hazardous environments.”
Reading this, it sure seemed like a lot of work. Pass.
Same with the category of General Attorney. No, you don’t have to be an attorney, but it does involve working with them, which sounds just as bad, at least to me. The pay varies from as low as $63,163 to as high as $195,200 per year. It says these jobs are open to all “U.S. Citizens, Nationals or those who owe allegiance to the U.S.”
The third category, and the one I thought seemed to offer the rawest thrills, is Deportation Officer. This job is meant for people like me over 40 years old; it pays between $63,148 to $101,860 per year. It entails a whole slew of job duties. First and foremost: “Performing law enforcement duties to investigate, identify, locate, arrest, detain, prosecute, and remove foreign nationals who pose a threat to national security and public safety, as well as those that enter the United States illegally with the intent to undermine the integrity of the nation’s immigration laws and border control efforts.”
Holy moly, that sure does cover a lot of ground—not just those folks who present a threat to the public but even those who have in the back of their minds an “intent to undermine the integrity” of the nation’s perfect immigration laws.
THE ICE AD HELPFULLY INCLUDES a list of Frequently Asked Questions for all three of its application “mission” areas. For instance, “What happens after I apply?” The answer: “We will move fast.” There will be a rapid assessment followed by a quick winnowing of applicants followed by prompt notifications of one’s “status” in the application process.
So how dangerous is the job of protecting America from the hordes of murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and gang members in our midst? The answer: “ICE law enforcement officers should expect a certain level of risk when performing their duties; however, they are expertly trained and every precaution is taken by ICE when it comes to protecting its officers’ well-being.”
These expertly trained and exceedingly cautious agents are now arresting people for showing up at court proceedings or going to work. They are arresting citizens as well as non-citizens. They are smashing windows and dragging people out of cars, chasing farm workers across fields, arresting parents in front of their children. You know, the highest standards of performance.
In the end, I decided not to apply for the position. It’s not that I think 66 is too old to be helping ICE go after “the worst of the worst.” It’s just that I’m not sure anymore who the worst of the worst are. Some of them may be the ones wearing masks and ICE jackets.
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