Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to hire over 10,000 new officers and lawyers. Photo / Joshua Lott, The Washington Post
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking new office spaces in hundreds of locations across the United States to support plans to hire thousands of new lawyers and immigration enforcement officers, according to six federal officials familiar with the matter and records obtained by the Washington Post.
The office spaces are being sought on ICE’s behalf by the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for managing federal real estate, according to the officials and the records.
In recent weeks, high-level staffers with ICE approached the GSA and said the Government needed to secure roughly 300 new office sites as fast as possible nationwide, in a bid to house more than 10,000 new employees, the officials and the records show.
The GSA has formed special planning teams to facilitate ICE’s expansion, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Records obtained by the Post show there are now standing meetings within the GSA to discuss the “ICE surge”.
ICE has said it plans to hire more than 10,000 new immigration officers, as well as additional lawyers to prosecute removal cases.
Those new staffers will be located at offices spread across the US, some in red cities and red states, including in the South and the Midwest, according to one federal official with direct knowledge of the expansion efforts. No leases have yet been signed, as the initiative is still in the procurement phase, according to another official directly familiar with the project.
Contacted for comment, the GSA provided a written statement attributed to a spokesperson: “We are proud to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in fulfilling their mission to protect America. We are working closely with our agency partners to ensure they have the facilities that fit their workforce needs.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The enforcement agency is expanding rapidly as the Trump Administration seeks to deport undocumented immigrants.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Wednesday that ICE has received more than 150,000 applications from “patriotic Americans” hoping to join in the Administration’s push to remove “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from the US”. The agency has made tentative job offers to 18,000 applicants, she said.
This summer, Congress tripled ICE’s enforcement and deportation budget to US$29.9 billion ($50.8b) and pledged $45b for construction of immigrant detention centres.
In its recruiting push, the agency has lifted age caps for applicants and encouraged retired ICE agents and law enforcement officers to rejoin the ranks, offering bonuses of up to US$50,000.
Now ICE staffers are placing intense pressure on the GSA to sign leases as fast as possible, according to the federal official with direct knowledge of the programme. “It’s like, we want this yesterday,” the official said.
At least one meeting scheduled this month within the GSA to discuss the ICE surge shows that agency staff are facing stiff demands for speed.
“We’re off to the races with the ICE effort,” reads one message announcing the meeting, obtained by the Post. “I’m trying to pack an hour’s worth of material into 30 mins.”
ICE staffers have also expressed the view that money is no object, even though the cost of adding all the new offices will easily run into the tens if not hundreds of millions, the official familiar with the project said.
The new sites being sought on ICE’s behalf are mostly furnished office spaces, according to two officials with knowledge of the programme. In some instances, ICE personnel may wind up taking over federal offices left vacant after the US Doge Service terminated parts of agencies, the officials said. And in other cases, ICE may take over existing leases, the officials said.
GSA posted a listing on a public federal contracting website this month asking for “competitive lease proposals for as-is, fully-finished and furnished office space in support of administrative operations for law enforcement.”
The proposed locations include major cities in Alabama, Idaho, South Carolina, Florida, and Wisconsin, among other places. GSA did not immediately respond to a question asking whether the listing is part of the ICE expansion effort.
The surge in ICE hiring aims in particular to expand two branches of the agency, two officials said: the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).
The OPLA is effectively the legal arm of ICE, with more than 2000 lawyers and support staff who help prosecute immigration removal cases, as well as provide legal advice to the agency and defend it in court, according to ICE’s website.
ERO handles “all aspects” of immigration enforcement, the website says, “including the identification, arrest, detention and removal of aliens who are subject to removal or are unlawfully present in the US”.
Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA law professor and an expert on immigration and citizenship law, said the expansion is a natural next step after Congress expanded ICE funding and the Supreme Court granted ICE authority to detain people based on race and language, broadening the population of people who may find themselves under investigation.
“It suggests that we’re looking at a much broader, pervasive enforcement apparatus that’s going to be part of everyday contact between individuals and law enforcement,” said Motomura, the co-director of the Centre for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.
“And in this regard, it’s significant that US citizens have already been caught up in the dragnet before this expansion.”
Motomura compared the rapid expansion of ICE’s powers and capacity to other law enforcement initiatives in US history: the expansion of federal law enforcement powers after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations during the Cold War; and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, among others.
“When these things have happened, courts have stepped in, lawyers bring lawsuits. You get some pushback, but the pushback never seems to push things back to where they were,” Motomura said.
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