We Spent Six Hours at ICE Training School. Here’s What We Learned.

GLYNCO, Ga.—As constituent of their grooming, young recruits to be union soldier deportation officers ar confronted with an obstacle course: They must scale a 6-foot wall, bear crawl through water mains, jump through a window and drag a 170-pound dummy 50 feet across the ground.

They must complete it all in a minute and 45 seconds.

That task, one of the basic requirements of Immigration and Customs Enforcement training, is emblematic of a similarly herculean undertaking their agency is attempting to pull off in a short window: nearly tripling its ranks of deportation officers.

ICE has long had a corps of about 6,000 officers trained in arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants. But flush with cash from President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful bill,” the agency is attempting to recruit and train an additional 10,000.

The White House has imposed steep expectations on ICE to conduct 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations by Trump’s first year in office, a pace that is roughly double what the agency is currently on track to achieve.

To meet that goal, top officials have put pressure on ICE leadership to wrap up hiring by the end of this calendar year, according to U.S. Officials familiar with the matter.

As ICE instructor at the Georgia training center lifting a heavy dummy during a demonstration.ICE is aiming to more than double the instructor staff at ICE’s academy, from 30 to 70 instructors.

The risk, according to former officials, is that ICE will cut corners under pressure by graduating new officers who are underqualified or undertrained.

“When you hire that many people that fast, you make mistakes,” said Deborah Fleischaker, who served as chief of staff at ICE under the Biden administration.

On Thursday, ICE invited journalists on a tour of its training regimen for deportation officers, to emphasize that its standards remain high amid the White House-imposed quotas.

“One of my things that I really held my ground on was the fact that I wasn’t going to water down training,” said Todd Lyons, the agency’s acting director at the start of the tour.

Acting ICE director Todd Lyons, right, says he has no intention of watering down training as the agency picks up hiring.

Some standards have been loosened. ICE, for example, dropped the requirement that new officers be between the ages of 21 and 40. New recruits can be as young as 18—advertisements emphasize that no college degree is needed—or in their 60s, so long as they can still pass physical exams.

To make the training go faster, the agency has also reduced the length of some of its courses, including firearms instruction, and cut one core topic entirely: Spanish instruction. Instead of requiring students to complete a five-week Spanish proficiency course, leadership is now handing officers a live translation tool they can use during arrests.

Training in person at the federal Law Enforcement Training Centers here in southern Georgia has been reduced from roughly 16 weeks to eight, though Lyons said new recruits are receiving some virtual training before they arrive and even after they are assigned to ICE offices around the country.

Meanwhile, ICE is aiming to more than double the instructor staff at ICE’s academy, from 30 to 70 instructors.

Students moving through the training course are taught how to carry and shoot a gun; handle less-than-lethal weapons including tasers and batons; and drive at top speeds to respond to an emergency or give chase to a fleeing suspect.

The course also involves classroom instruction in immigration laws. Recruits are taught, for example, how to establish “reasonable suspicion” that a suspect is in the country illegally. (Speaking Spanish, an ICE lawyer told reporters, isn’t enough.)

The Wall Street Journal wasn’t shown live classroom instruction during the visit. Rather, instructors at the academy simulated different training scenarios. In one, instructors showed reporters how recruits on an elite ICE tactical team would serve a criminal warrant and raid a home.

Roughly a dozen instructors loaded out of a van and pounded on the door of a mock home, shouting “open up!” They didn’t wait long before setting off a flash bang and entering the home, guns drawn, where they quickly scattered to comb through different rooms.

ICE leadership has also started adapting its curriculum based on what officers are confronted with on the street, said assistant director Caleb Vitello, who leads up the agency’s training program.

In recent months, for example, Vitello said officers have started to be taught how to respond when onlookers throw rocks at them or ram their cars. (He didn’t specify the appropriate response to either scenario.) Following the protests against ICE in Los Angeles, officers are now being issued helmets and gas masks.

Lyons, the acting ICE director, said officers are allowed to decide whether to wear masks covering their faces, because more ICE officers have been assaulted or doxxed since Trump took office.

“I don’t like the fact that our folks gotta wear ‘em, but I’m not gonna prevent our folks from going home safe at night,” he said.

In addition to face covering, officers have been seen making arrests without badges or other insignia that identify them as ICE, according to numerous videos and immigration advocates. Lyons said he doesn’t know of a scenario where ICE officers have worn nothing to identify themselves as police. In any case, he said, anyone who is arrested is issued a paper summons with the officers’ name. The public doesn’t have a right to that information, Lyons said.

ICE is looking to avoid repeating some of the mistakes made by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, when it made a similar effort to staff up the Border patrol following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The government lowered hiring standards and performed more cursory background checks. As a result, later reports found, misconduct inside the Border Patrol skyrocketed, and more agents were arrested for misconduct.

Lyons said he wouldn’t allow a similar thing to happen now.

“On the back end side, if a new recruit comes out and they’re just not getting it, we’re not going to just throw them in the field,” he said.

Write to Michelle Hackman at michelle.hackman@wsj.com

---

---