Trump: Hire more agents
President calls for 15,000 new ICE, CBP workers
President Donald Trump has called for the hiring of 15,000 new immigration and border agents to help carry out his executive orders to greatly increase immigration enforcement inside the United States and along its southern border.
In memos implementing the president’s executive orders on immigration and border security, Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Immigration and Customs Enforcement should “expeditiously hire” 10,000 additional agents and U.S. Customs and Border Protection should “immediately begin” hiring 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents.
Combined, the 15,000 new agents would cost $1.38 billion to $1.48 billion annually, or between $13 billion to nearly $15 billion over 10 years, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute.
Such a massive buildup in staffing would require approval from Congress, could take years to achieve, and could lead to changes in hiring standards aimed at preventing corruption and bribery from drug cartels.
Trump’s plan would likely encounter strong resistance from Democrats and from fiscal conservatives in his own party in Congress. It comes as the
president wants to build a giant southwestern border wall to curtail illegal immigration and is also calling for a sharp increase in military spending that would be paid for by slashing other areas of the federal budget, including education, the environment and foreign aid.
“This is very expensive. It’s clear that President Trump has a desire to shift resources towards Homeland Security, but shift them from where, because this is a lot of money,” said Ryan Alexander, director of Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent watchdog group.
“What is the evidence that this is going to make the difference that you want to make? (That is what) is missing right now.”
Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that supports Trump’s immigration-enforcement plans, said Congress ultimately will have to decide how many more ICE and Border Patrol agents to fund.
But he said 10,000 more ICE agents are needed to expand the agency’s ability to arrest and deport immigrants who violate immigration laws. The additional costs would be worth it, he said.
“It costs a lot of money to not enforce immigration laws,” he said. “The failure to enforce our immigration laws leads to billions of social costs to the American public every year. There has to be a sense that if the law says that if you are in the country illegally then you are subject to deportation, and that that means something.”
Mehlman said he also supports hiring 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents, which he says are needed to deter the recent increase in apprehensions and gain control of the entire border.
Mehlman said, “Deterrence is an important part of any type of law enforcement. When people believe there are law-enforcement officers out there prepared to enforce the law, they behave rationally, they decide not to break it in the first place.”
When it comes to immigration enforcement, Border Patrol agents are primarily responsible for stopping people from entering the country illegally between official ports of entry along the southern and northern borders. ICE agents and officers, meanwhile, are responsible for finding, arresting and deporting immigrants caught living inside the U.S. without authorization or who commit crimes that revoke their privileges to remain in the U.S. legally.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates hiring 10,000 new ICE officers would cost $600 million to $700 million annually or between $6 billion and $7 billion over 10 years.
ICE requested total funding of $6.2 billion for fiscal 2017 and the agency employs 19,971 people, including 5,900 Enforcement and Removal Operations officers and 6,000 special agents assigned to its Homeland Security Investigations division.
Hiring 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, meanwhile, would cost an additional $780 million annually, according to the institute. That works out to $7.8 billion over 10 years.
Customs and Border Protection requested $13.9 billion for fiscal 2017. That includes funding for 21,070 Border Patrol agents, or about a third of the agency’s entire 61,484 employees.
“To hire around 15,000 additional personnel, the administration will need congressional appropriations,” said Faye Hipsman, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “There does not currently exist money within these agencies to staff up so significantly.”
Even if Congress approves the funding, “the hiring process would be lengthy,” Hipsman said.
CBP has already struggled to fill available positions. It had 19,828 Border Patrol agents in fiscal 2016, according to the most recent data available. That was 1,542 fewer than the 21,370 available Border Patrol positions that year.
“It’s a tough job, it requires long hours, and it requires people to live in areas that are more remote and might not be as desirable, so there are a lot of reasons why the agency has had difficulty keeping up with hiring levels,” Hipsman said.
U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., cast doubt on Trump’s plan to hire 15,000 new ICE and CBP officers, given the costs, the needed approval from Congress and existing hiring difficulties.
“I think it’s a number that is unrealistic,” he said.
He also said it would be a mistake to loosen hiring standards given that ICE and Border Patrol agents are given far more latitude to deport immigrants under Trump’s immigration orders.
Department of Homeland Security officials have testified to lawmakers in Congress that criminal organizations have tried to infiltrate the CBP during previous hiring surges, the report said.
“I think that is very dangerous,” Grijalva said. “The rush to judgement in hiring all those people initially when huge increases in Border Patrol personnel occurred produced a lot of problems, with a lot of people that shouldn’t be in there. It produced problems with the integrity of the force itself.”
Republic reporter Dan Nowicki contributed to this article.