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Congress must ensure that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) improves recruiting, hiring, and training standards to prevent unqualified candidates from being hired and ensure that all Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents are extensively trained to prepare them to fulfill their roles safely and lawfully.
Indeed, federal law enforcement must be held to the same or higher professional standards as the state and local agencies they operate alongside. While local police departments across the country have strengthened training, transparency, and accountability policies in recent years, DHS has lowered standards under the second Trump administration. DHS should follow the lead of state and local agencies by adopting tested policies that prevent the hiring of unqualified or high-risk agents and ensure that all personnel receive the training needed to conduct themselves safely and appropriately in the field. Congress must intervene to mandate rigorous vetting, high-quality training, and robust use-of-force policies to ensure that federal immigration agents are held to the same professional standards as local police.
Problem: DHS is creating dangerous conditions on the street by failing to provide proper training to ICE and CBP agents
According to an ICE whistleblower, under the second Trump administration, ICE has reduced training hours by 41 percent and passed recruits who used excessive force in training exercises. ICE now requires just 344 hours of training before starting, compared with an average of 806 hours for state and local academy basic training.
Recommendation 1: DHS should improve training, strengthen use-of-force policies, and hold agents accountable for violations
DHS should:
- Ensure that ICE and CBP agents have access to continuous, high-quality training that prepares them for the current and evolving dynamics of the job and has been demonstrated to improve outcomes in communities.
- Expand its de-escalation training through a transparent process and ensure it is updated and informed by best practices in policing.
- Restore use-of-force instruction that was recently cut, prevent agents who fail to pass use-of-force trainings from deploying, adopt increased standards for use of force, and reinstate mechanisms used to track and discipline misconduct.
Use-of-force and de-escalation training is reducing violent incidents and improving outcomes for state and local law enforcement agencies
- The Chicago Police Department’s Situational Decision-making training reduced the likelihood that participating officers would use force by 23 percent.
- Louisville, Kentucky’s, Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics training reduced use-of-force incidents by 28 percent, civilian injuries by 26 percent, and officer injuries by 36 percent.
Recommendation 2: DHS should ensure that agents are properly trained to limit dangerous vehicle pursuits and shootings at vehicles
DHS should:
- Increase standards for vehicle pursuits and ensure officers are given proper guidance and training to assess when the harm of a pursuit outweighs the potential benefits.
- Provide regular, transparent reporting on the characteristics of vehicle pursuits.
- Improve its use-of-force policy to require officers to move out of the way of moving vehicles when possible to reduce dangerous shootings at moving vehicles.
Local vehicle engagement and pursuit policies have promoted public safety when strengthened and undermined it when removed
- Departments that prohibit shooting at fleeing vehicles have reduced the number of and the racial disparities in police shootings without increasing officer injuries or deaths.
- Milwaukee rolled back its vehicle pursuit restrictions and saw a 15-fold increase in the number of pursuits and a significant drop in the percentage that resulted in a stop.
- The Chatham County Police Department in Chatham County, Georgia, where Dr. Linda Davis was killed when a vehicle being pursued by ICE crashed into her vehicle, has a policy that limits pursuits to instances where there are reasonable grounds to believe that someone has or will commit a forcible felony. Considering that ICE has acknowledged that the driver pursued had no prior criminal record, let alone for a violent felony, had ICE followed the county standard, Davis may still be alive today.
Problem: DHS is using racist imagery in its recruitment materials and is failing to screen out incompatible candidates
Racism, extremism, and misconduct have no place in law enforcement.
Recommendation 3: DHS must improve recruitment, screening, and hiring practices to prevent the hiring of extremists or people with histories of misconduct
DHS should:
- Develop and implement strong policies to screen out candidates with extremist affiliations and past misconduct before hiring and remove agents who are found to have engaged in misconduct or have ties to extremist organizations after employment has begun.
- Invest in hiring additional investigators to ensure that candidates receive a thorough, multistep background investigation that screens for relevant skills, desired or undesired character traits, and dangerous or unlawful past activity.
States have set clear standards for background investigations and use diverse evaluation and investigatory tools to weed out undesirable applicants
- Oregon requires background investigations to include “an assessment of the applicant’s tendencies, feelings and opinions toward diverse cultures, races and ethnicities.”
- Minnesota uses the Multiphasic Personality Inventory to screen for personality traits such as aggressiveness and dishonesty.
- Iowa prevents officers who were fired for misconduct from being hired elsewhere in the state, and California created a statewide database for tracking misconduct and use-of-force incidents.
Problem: DHS has reduced the minimum age requirement for becoming an agent from 21 to 18, despite evidence that the likelihood of police shooting incidents or receipt of civilian complaints decreases with age
Recommendation 4: DHS should reinstate 21 as the minimum age requirement
Most state and federal police require that officers be 21 years old or older, and the minimum age requirement to be an FBI special agent is 23.