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ICE’s extremely online recruitment strategy

58 10
23.01.2026

An ICE promotion at a major hiring event on August 26, 2025, in Arlington, Texas. | Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

In the last year, ICE has doubled in size – which is all part of President Donald Trunp’s agenda to turbocharge the government’s mass deportation efforts.

Key takeaways

ICE is pursuing a “wartime” recruitment strategy to rapidly expand the agency, using aggressive messaging that draws inspiration from memes and video games. Internal documents show the agency is targeting specific audiences through geofenced ads, framing immigration enforcement as a patriotic, combat-like mission. Current and former officials warn the campaign’s emphasis on aggression risks attracting poorly vetted recruits and flattening a complex policy issue into a good-versus-evil narrative.

But the agency’s massive push for new agents has led to reportedly poor vetting of applicants and a lowering of the agency’s standards. Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell recently got his hands on an internal ICE document outlining the agency’s recruitment plans for 2026. The agency wants to find 14,000 new ICE employees — on top of the more than 20,000 officers and agents it currently has — by appealing to fans of NASCAR, UFC, and patriotic podcasts. They’re calling it their “wartime recruitment” strategy, and Harwell says the meme-fied and macho tenor of ICE’s online advertisements tell us a lot about who the agency is trying to bring into its fold.

Harwell spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about ICE’s recruitment efforts and what they say about the present and future makeup of the agency.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What’s this internal ICE document and what’s in it?

This is an internal confidential document that ICE officers spread to each other that outlines what they call their “surge hiring recruiting strategy.” It lays out $100 million in recruiting spending that they want to pour into social media advertising and real-world advertising.

They want to reach pro-ICE influencers who can get the message out. They want to go to gun fairs, gun shows, hunting shows to reach people — to reach more than 10,000 potential deportation officers, lawyers, and other staffers that can help them carry out this giant deportation that the Trump administration has been promising.

They’ve never done anything like this. If you’ve gone on X or YouTube or Instagram, they have these really patriotic machismo ads that say the “enemies are at the........

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