The 18-Year-Old Vigilante ICE Agent Is Coming
The trouble with getting rid of age limits for new ICE hires.
DEAN CAIN, WHO PLAYED SUPERMAN in the 1990s TV show Lois & Clark, announced last week that he was joining ICE. You’d be excused for missing the announcement. After all, it’s Dean Cain.
But here he was on Fox News, explaining his decision by noting that he is already a sworn deputy sheriff and a reserve police officer.
“This country was built on patriots stepping up, whether it was popular or not, and doing the right thing,” Cain said. “I truly believe this is the right thing.”
Will Cain be rounding up workers, taxpayers, or churchgoers who have been here decades? No. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the New York Times that the actor will be merely “an honorary ICE Officer.” He will help ICE further its massive new recruiting push, one that is already swelling its ranks.
That a man who once portrayed a superhero who was literally an alien (and who stayed hidden on quintessentially American farmland) is now devoting himself to going after the undocumented, has provided no shortage of fodder for comedians and commentators. TV host Van Lathan chuckled, “It’s not 1995. No one gives a sad hell what Dean Cain thinks.” Referring to the signing bonus ICE is offering new recruits, Lathan added, “Dean needs the $50,000—that’s what got him off the couch.”
John Oliver quipped that it was probably a bad sign that ICE has been “reduced to pinning a badge on the 59-year-old star of The Dog Who Saved Christmas, The Dog Who Saved Christmas Vacation, The Dog Who Saved the Holidays, The Dog Who Saved Halloween, The Dog Who Saved Easter, and The Dog Who Saved Summer.”
But Cain’s ICE enlistment really isn’t a laughing matter. Rather it is the most high-profile illustration of the lowering of agency standards that is setting off alarms in immigrant rights and civil rights communities.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced an end to age restrictions for employment at ICE. “Qualified candidates can now apply with no age limit,” she said. Before the change, applicants to ICE had to be at least 21 years old, and no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position they were applying for, according to the Associated Press. They can now be as young as 18 or as old as Methuselah.
In making this change, Noem invited the possibility of allowing into the ranks people not just of Cain’s relatively advanced age—at 59, he’s two decades outside the former upper age limit for applicants—but also gun-toting, masked teenagers with minimal training and experience. The possibility of these people swarming restaurants, shops, factories, churches, and homes looking for immigrants, all with the imprimatur—not to mention the qualified immunity—of federal law enforcement, has never been so real.
Regular readers of this newsletter might remember the July 25 issue about how ICE’s rush to hire 10,000 people as quickly as possible would inevitably result in relaxed standards and poorer training. Removing the lower age restriction—which serves as a proxy not just for work experience but for experience in the world generally, not to mention development of the frontal cortex and emotional maturation—only invites further problems and abuses.
Noem’s remarks understandably spooked a lot of people. Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigrant-rights group America’s Voice, said details about ICE’s plans should send a chill down every American’s spine.
“Take a teenager with more testosterone than wisdom, arm them with guns and masks, fast cars and—to top it off—dangle cash incentives for indiscriminate and speedy arrests,” she said. “Mix in an ICE culture of impunity and overreach. Now, what could go wrong?”
And there’s precedent for a move like this creating problems. Deb Fleishaker, who served more than a dozen years at DHS, told me that in previous cases when standards were relaxed and hiring spiked, corruption among Customs and Border Patrol agents went through the roof. One study found that arrests of CBP employees rose 44 percent from 2007 to 2012. A New York Times investigation found that over a ten-year period, CBP employees and contractors took $15 million in bribes.
“We’ve seen with DHS when they’ve reduced hiring requirements it’s gone very badly,” Fleishaker said. “I think standards and training are hugely important to doing the job appropriately and carefully. This is further evidence that the Department cares about the numbers of bodies and numbers of arrests, without counterbalancing what the impact of those bodies and arrests will be.”
What’s in the Heart of an 18-Year-Old ICE Recruit?
WE LIVE IN AN ERA IN WHICH some of the worst leadership has come from some of our oldest politicians. So I’m not going to sit here and say all teens or twentysomethings are evil dummies. That would be inaccurate. But what idea about America does a teenager possess that makes him or her want to aggressively round up immigrants? And, to be clear, that’s precisely how ICE is advertising the gig: an opportunity to round up criminal immigrants.
Some under-21-year-old applicants may be driven by a political ideology that holds the country would be better off with mass deportations. Some may be in a place of desperation, looking for easy work with few hurdles and good pay. Some may be nativists. Others may have even more dangerous motivations. This is what screening is for: to sort out this kind of stuff. Reduce the screening effect of age limits and you increase the likelihood of hiring bad people. It isn’t hard to imagine how the worst of these motivations could play out in horrible ways.
Chris Newman, the general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and a lawyer for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, said that, with the huge ramping up of recruiting and the dropping of age limits, he fears ICE may end up composed of agents who were rejected from every other law enforcement agency. Consciously or not, he warned, the administration was giving people from the fringes of society power over those with less power.
“It’s a commonly known fact that recruiting efforts in the past have attracted the bottom of the barrel in terms of talent,” he said. But now, he added, “it’s no laughing matter to think of the type of disturbed individuals that they are attracting.”
One Last Thing
Check out this Bulwark piece from Linda Chavez yesterday, “Trump’s Immigration Policy Is Built on a Massive Political Miscalculation.” She argues that Trump doesn’t understand why Americans care about illegal immigration in the first place.
18 year olds who can’t buy a drink (wisely) or pass a background check to own a gun, whose literacy aptitude doesn’t extend beyond comic books and think the world operates like a video game, will now be given a mask and a fully loaded automatic weapon to play real life “cowboys and Indians” with full immunity to cause whatever havoc they choose.
Probably joined by Proud Boys and everyone who stormed the Capitol on January 6!
The best plan is for progressives to bombard ICE with employment applications. Just imagine the canine assassin's consternation. I doubt if Noem can be trained, though.