You may have seen one of these videos online of someone being picked up by what looks like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It's ICE. They're taking a mom and everybody's freaking out about it.

You can't always be sure, given that ICE officers are prone to wearing masks these days. But sometimes, bystanders watch and film. In some cases, they try to intervene.

You're hurting her! Would you stop this? Would you STOP this?

'Donald Trump has kept his promise to voters to launch a mass deportation, but ICE, as it is, is too small to do it. That's about to change. With the new mega bill he signed last week, President Trump got $75 billion more to spend on more ICE officers, equipment, and detention centers. Here's Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem making the pitch on what's to come. From the opening of Florida's self-described alligator alcatraz.

We're looking at other locations as well. We've had several other states that are actually using alligator Alcatraz as a model for how they can partner with us as well

ICE is on track to become the largest federal security force, bigger than the FBI, ATF, just about every other agency around in just the next five years. But history has shown us what can happen when we demand law enforcement agencies ramp up and take on new recruits fast in a heated political moment.

It is, I think to be very frank about it, a recruitment pitch for all of America's worst bullies. Are you excited to dress up like you are going to go take Fallujah in tactical gear with long guns and masks and then go raid a Home Depot parking lot?

I'm Adi Kornish and this is The Assignment. ICE is just over 20 years old, which in federal agency years is relatively young. It was among the alphabet soup of agencies formed under the newly established Department of Homeland Security. And here's an example that I found on their YouTube channel of the kind of recruitment pitch you might hear in the

'Working for ICE is a tremendous source of pride for me. Immigration Customs Enforcement was born out of the events of 9-11, and it stood up specifically to address the threats that face our homeland.

'Fast forward to today, and the agency has a more rough-and-tumble image. And you get the sense they know that, because in the messaging, you hear this. Everybody has this misconception of, we're just out here to deport people and separate families. But this shift is more than perception. ICE operates very differently from other agencies. And I wanted to know why.

I'm Garrett Graff, I'm a journalist and historian and I write a newsletter called Doomsday Scenario and host a history podcast called Long Shout Out.

Okay. So in the name there, you're really just leaning in. You're not even pretending that this is going to be a cheerful story. Graff once covered immigration and border security when he was the editor of Politico Magazine. And over the years he's chronicled the rise of ICE.

'ICE was a creation alongside as part of the Department of Homeland Security right after 9-11, and it brought together two different federal law enforcement agencies, the inspectors of the U.S. Customs Service, which were then part of The Department of Treasury, and that is now a division known as HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, that focuses drug smugglers, human traffickers, antique smuggling, custom smuggling nuclear nonproliferation. They do really cool, really complex national security cases. And then the other half of ICE is what used to be known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was part of the Justice Department. And that is now something called ERO. Enforcement and removal operations. And when we think of ICE, that's really what we're thinking of.

And with the infusion of cash and people, he says that culture is about to change.

If you took the FBI, the ATF, the Secret Service, and the Marshals through in the DEA there, you still wouldn't get to the level of funding that we are now giving to ICE over the next couple of years with this new explosion of funding for immigration enforcement.

I just want to pause, that's wild, like that, that is crazy.

It is, and I think one of the things, so that money comes in a couple of different buckets. It goes to hiring about 10,000 new ICE agents. There's money in there also to hire about 3,000 new customs and border protection officers and agents. That's the border patrol, that's the sort of officers at US border customs that you're sort of used to in going through airports. And building new detention facilities, building new border infrastructure.

'So that's all you're paying for all your Alligator Alcatraz's, right? There's money in there to kind of encourage states to try to make up their own pop-up temporary detention facilities. So you're talking about when you talk about it being bigger than all the other agencies, you're saying all the money it'll have to do everything it wants from the officers who pursue people to where they put them, like the entire system is going to grow.

Yeah, and to put this in like very frank terms, we are giving ICE about as much money as we spend on the US Marines each year.

How much is that?

About $50 billion a year.

Okay. Still a lot. I just like needed some sense of scale. I was thinking about ICE in the context of other agencies because it's relatively young. What makes ICE distinct in its culture?

'Yeah, so one of the challenges of ICE on the ERO side, this immigration enforcement side, is this was already an agency that had some of the lowest hiring standards, lowest educational standards, and lowest training standards of any federal law enforcement agency, certainly any of the big ones. To give you sort of just a very specific example. Um, to join the FBI, you have to have a college degree. You have to also have professional experience or an advanced degree, a law degree or accounting degree. You, uh, you, have to be at least 23 years old. Uh, you to pass a top secret background check, a security clearance check, and then you undergo 20 weeks of training ice by comparison on ERO side, there is no educational requirement. You only have to pass a secret level, which is a lower level security clearance check. And then you only go through sort of 12 or 13 weeks of Academy training before you go into your work on the field. So these are-

Sorry, you said 12 or 13 weeks

And so this is an agency that already has some of the lowest standards for its officers in the U.S. Government. And what worries me about all of this money that we are throwing at the agency now is that in order to grow at the scale and scope and speed that the Trump administration hopes to grow it.

Right, 10,000 new officers.

10,000 new officers more than doubling the number on the immigration side, they're going to have to do what any agency does when it hires in a surge like that and lower its hiring standards, lower its training standards and lower it's supervision standards.

Okay, let me stick up for ICE. What makes you think that that's where this is going? Meaning there might be, like right now, military recruiters are having a good time. People are signing up to be in the military. What is the reason why you think this is automatically going to be, uh, in a way you're implying a lower quality batch of people who may be coming in next?

'It's a great question, Audie, and the answer is every single agency that has ever tried to do this in the entire history of American criminal justice and American policing. That it's sort of well-known in criminal justice in policing worlds that a healthy law enforcement agency cannot grow quickly. And to be clear, and we can spend more time talking about this, Audie is not a law enforcement agency. But when you look at the history, anyone in policing can rattle off the agencies that have tried to grow quickly. Miami in the 1980s, the infamous Metropolitan Police Department class of 1989 when Washington Mayor Marion Barry tried to grow the force by 50% in a single year. Both of those agencies saw enormous waves of criminality, misconduct and corruption. And then actually we even have. A more recent, very clear example that I spent years reporting on myself when I was at Politico within DHS, within ICE's sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, where we did a massive hiring surge in the late 2000s under Bush and Obama, doubled the number of Border Patrol agents from about 9,000 to 18,000. And the result was... sort of one of the most disruptive waves of corruption and criminality and misconduct we've ever seen in federal law enforcement.

Yeah, I think this is where we get that for people who do have some stigma about Customs and Border Patrol, who maybe look at that agency a little different, it might kind of stem from this period. Because even as a reporter, I remember a time when there would be stories that would come out about officers.

So to put sort of some specific numbers on this, from 2005 to 2012, more than 2170 CBP officers and agents were arrested for misconduct and corruption. And to make that clear, from 2005 to 2012. One CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for misconduct, crimes, or corruption. And as late as 2017, when I was still reporting on this, that arrest pace had only slowed to one officer or an agent every 36 hours. Now remember, this is like a federal law enforcement agency. Like this, if anything, this should be sort of like. Less criminal than the average general population.

'And this is not anec-data, right? Like, this is now you being like, I've heard there were problems of corruption. It's like, you could look up arrest on arrest. I don't know about all the convictions, but that's a lot of arrests.

I went to I interviewed a CBP commissioner when I was writing about this for Politico, who told me on the record, we accidentally hired cartel members, like they were just not doing the background vetting that they were supposed to they weren't doing the Background Investigations that they were supposed too. They were not doing the training that they Were supposed to and then they were pushing these agents out into the field before they were ready. They actually hired a serial killer. There was a border patrol agent who was arrested for his serial murder, rape, kidnapping, and murder of women in Texas while he was a Border Patrol agent a few years ago. I mean, this is a wild level of criminality, and I think it's actually exactly what we're about to experience with ICE.

More with Garrett Graff after the break.

It's funny, I went to the ICE website to look at, you know, the videos and things like that they might be putting out to draw people. And the one that caught my eye was not the one that was like images of people being arrested and put on planes, which also was there. But there was one person who was explaining, you know it's important for me to show that this job isn't all just like arresting people and taking them from their families. And it reminded me that even they know that that's what people think they do.

'And that to me actually is the thing that I most worry about with this hiring surge, which is we have never in American law enforcement, never in federal law enforcement seen a hiring surge take place within an agency as polarizing and partisan as ICE is today. So if you look at that post-9-11 hiring surge, we put a lot of new agents into the FBI, we doubled the border patrol, there were huge ramp ups in programs like the air marshals, but the recruitment pitch was this deeply patriotic post- 9-11, agree or disagree with it, whatever, but the pitch was, come be part of the first line of defense against terrorists. You know, America- All of us, all Americans, yeah. We are, America was attacked, you know, you are going to be part of the elite counter-terrorism forces that protect American way of life. That is not the hiring pitch that ICE is splashing across the front pages and the TV channels of America right now. They are, you now, you know, the photos, the stories, the videos, it is, I think, to be very frank about it, a recruitment pitch for all of America's worst bullies. Are you excited to dress up like you are going to go take Fallujah in tactical gear with long guns and masks and then go raid a Home Depot parking lot? Are you interested in doing hand-to-hand combat in courthouse hallways with Democratic members of Congress? Are you excited to go, you know, chase farm workers through fields, throwing tear gas canisters and flashbang grenades? You know, there's like, I think a level of sadism in the images that we are seeing out of ice right now. That are going to recruit exactly the wrong type of people to this job.

You're talking about recruitment you're also describing news stories right like so you're saying just the way it is depicted in public is the advertisement itself is the thing that is going to help people decide is this something I would want to do or not and maybe help people who are more uh civil liberties minded uh maybe make them feel like well maybe that's not the for me.

Yeah. And by the way, I think that this is an explicit part of MAGA's hiring pitch.

So you think that ICE wants those images out there?

I mean, look at what DHS, look at what CBP, look at what ICE is posting to social media. They are posting these incredibly aggressive, literally they posted a skeleton meme the other day about mass deportations. Look at the photo ops they're doing of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis walking and laughing through alligator Alcatraz. As so many people have said about the Trump administration over the years, like the cruelty is the point.

I think the defense from Tom Homan, who is the border czar and the person they put out frequently to talk about these things, is he has said

The rhetoric against the men and women of ICE is skyrocketing, especially by members of Congress. We have senators, we have Congress people that compare ICE to the Nazis, compare ICE to racists, and it just continues. So the public thinks, well, if a member of Congress can attack ICE, why can't we? So the rhetoric has to stop.

And he's also talked about this contributing to their kind of amped up approach that they now have to be defensive or fearful while they're doing their job.

'And I think my answer would be ICE didn't have to do this up until six months ago. Up until six months ago, they were they were actually deporting more people than they are now that this is the change has come because of who, who and where ICE is targeting. And this is, I think, an important part of the ICE story right now, which is, you know, Stephen Miller went to ICE headquarters this spring and demanded that they get to 3,000 arrests a day. That gives them sort of in round numbers about a million a year. And you know we were talking earlier about how for most of its 20-year existence ICE has focused on, again, oversimplifying this, the quote unquote actual criminals. Thanks for watching! That they've used prosecutorial discretion to go after the gang members, cartel members, et cetera. If you're trying to arrest 3,000 people a day, you have to go America's grandmas. You have to round up people in Home Depot parking lots. You have round up at farms because the work of going after the targeted sort of bad criminals just takes too long.

Yeah, like it's easier to go after someone who has, you're saying, a civil infraction and not the resources to run. Right. Than a cartel member or someone who's made their life's work hiding from law enforcement. Exactly. You're saying it's just like, A, we should say in fairness, border apprehensions are down. Like those numbers are down and so you have to look elsewhere to make those apprehensions.

Yes, and this is where, you know, the main shift in ICE has come is who they are going after.

And how they're doing it. Like you were noting that even the FBI like they have their their jackets and like there's ways that we identify law enforcement even when they're not in a uniform and ICE is again shifting in its approach.

'America has no tradition of masked law enforcement outside of a couple of small and specific areas in certain high-profile SWAT raids or undercover drug operations. But when the FBI shows up to raid your office or your house, they're not wearing masks and they go out of their way to make clear that they're the FBI wearing their big blue. FBI raid jackets. ICE has gone in a totally different direction in these last six months and we're seeing them wear masks and part of the reason that the Tom Homans of the world say, well, ICE needs to be masked now is because what they're doing is so controversial that they are being sort of personally targeted and attacked. Which I think should tell you something about the public support for the work that they're doing, that like no federal law enforcement agency in American history has ever done anything as unpopular with the public as what ICE is doing right now.

Which is saying something when you think about U.S. History.

I have covered the FBI for 20 years and I can tell you.

So even during desegregation, like, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, like, again, like the US marshals and, you know, FBI agents protecting civil rights marchers like didn't feel that they needed to be masked.

Despite you being the author of a newsletter called The Doomsday Scenario, I'm going to ask you to also reach into the history and tell me what happens when places do find a way to rise up out of those corrupt practices. So I don't talk about the Washington DC police department the way people did back or Miami, like, what happens? For an agency to write itself, so to speak, to become healthy law enforcement.

'I'll give you an unfortunate example, which is one of the things that America realized after 9-11 was how broken and incompetent and culturally bereft Immigration and Naturalization services was, INS was.

INS. Oh, you're taking it back.

And what we did was we broke it apart and created ICE. And ICE is in some ways the bandaid for the last time our immigration enforcement efforts broke down. And I think in a very weird way, what ICE is doing to itself right now in terms of the level of aggression and I think sort of misconduct that we are seeing on display in America's streets on a daily basis right now means that abolishing ICE is going to become the moderate position of anyone hoping to dig us out of where the Trump administration and leaves us in the next couple of years.

Journalist and historian Garrett Graff. His newsletter is called The Doomsday Scenario. Find it at doomsdayscenario.co. We're going to have also CNN reporting on this topic as well. You can find both in our show notes. I want to thank you so much for listening. Please do follow, subscribe, leave a review and share. Every bit helps. And I'll see you next week.