How well are ICE's 12,000 new officers being trained?

Summary

Podcast Summary

The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode: How well are ICE's 12,000 new officers being trained?
Date: February 18, 2026
Hosts: Waylon Wong & Darian Woods

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Episode Overview

This episode examines the rapid expansion of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) due to a hiring surge of 12,000 new agents and officers—doubling the agency’s size. The show explores whether ICE’s training methods are keeping up with this expansion, the quality and length of training, and how both formal training and organizational culture shape officer behavior. Experts—including a former ICE trainer, an economist studying police training, and a law professor—offer insight into the likely outcomes for both new agents and the broader U.S. immigration system.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. ICE’s Rapid Expansion and Public Perception

• The Department of Homeland Security’s unprecedented recruitment drive brought 12,000 new agents to ICE, making it “one of the fastest growing and most scrutinized workplaces in the country right now.”
  — Darian Woods [00:45]
• Practices under scrutiny: Many affected by ICE’s crackdown “have no criminal conviction. Many have legal status and even US citizens have been taken into custody.”
  — Darian Woods [00:45]
• Growing public concern, with polls showing more Americans believe “the immigration crackdown has gone too far.” Calls range from dismantling ICE to advocating for better training and culture shifts.
  — Waylon Wong [01:07]

2. Where and How ICE Officers Are Trained

• The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, especially the main campus in Brunswick, Georgia, received $750 million for expanded training.
  — Waylon Wong [02:44]
• Description of training facility: It operates like a mini city, with mock storefronts, federal buildings, and various housing types—used for realistic scenario training. — Mark Brown [03:07]:

  “It has storefronts, shops, federal buildings... we would use that city to... show them, okay, this is how you're going to line up on the street.”

3. Training Protocols: Ideal vs. Reality

• Trainers like Mark Brown stress de-escalation and respecting protest rights:
  — Mark Brown [03:48]:

  “If they're protesting on the sideline... they have the right to protest your presence... Our biggest thing is keeping everybody safe.”

• Brown expresses concern that these protocols are not visible in recent agent behavior shown in viral videos. — [04:13]

4. Reduction in Training Length and Content

• Officially, DHS claims “the same number of training hours,” but evidence suggests training for new ICE agents is now 14 weeks—shorter than before and less than the national average for law enforcement.
  — Waylon Wong [04:50]; Mark Brown [04:50]
• Spanish language instruction, previously five weeks, was replaced with unspecified translation services.
  — Waylon Wong [05:26]

5. Importance of Field Training and Officer Pairing

• Economist Matthew Ross’s research indicates new officers closely model behavior of their field training officer (FTO).
  — Matthew Ross [05:55]:

  “If a recruit was assigned to a more aggressive field training officer, that recruit was significantly more likely to use force.”

• Matthew Ross [06:09]:

  “From as far as we can tell, if you happen to get paired up with a... training officer that used force frequently, you were just more likely to use force for the entirety of that three year period.”

• This effect can persist through an officer’s entire career.

6. Culture and Supervision Matter More Than Training

• Law professor and ex-officer Steph Stoughton believes problematic behavior often stems from internal culture and leadership, not a lack of training:
  — Steph Stoughton [06:50]:

  “I would be shocked if it's actually a training failure... some of the agents... are long standing veterans.”

• Supervisors’ instructions override formal training: — Steph Stoughton [07:27]:

  “Doesn't matter how you're trained. If your supervisor says you run up to those cars and if they don't get out immediately, you break the windows... that's what you're going to do.”

7. Accountability and Consequences

• Experts predict administration will face “multiple lawsuits” over ICE tactics but doubt financial/legal consequences will drive significant change: — Mark Brown [08:00]; Steph Stoughton [08:17]:

  “The financial incentives alone probably aren't going to do anything, especially not with an agency that just views that as the cost of doing business.”

8. Official Denials and Uncertainty

• DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insists training hours remain unchanged, despite evidence to the contrary and concerns from outside experts.
  — Waylon Wong [08:53]
• McLaughlin is leaving her post, having been the administration’s main defender of the mass deportation policy.

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Notable Quotes

• On crowd control and protest rights:

  “If they're protesting on the sideline, on the sidewalk, they have the right to protest your presence. So that's not something for you to engage in... Our biggest thing is keeping everybody safe.”
  — Mark Brown [03:48]

• On field training's influence:

  “If a recruit was assigned to a more aggressive field training officer, that recruit was significantly more likely to use force.”
  — Matthew Ross [05:55]

• On cultural influence vs. training:

  “Doesn't matter how you're trained. If your supervisor says you run up to those cars and if they don't get out immediately, you break the windows... that's what you're going to do.”
  — Steph Stoughton [07:27]

• On performative accountability:

  “An approach to accountability that I think communicates to agents that it's just performative... The financial incentives alone probably aren't going to do anything.”
  — Steph Stoughton [08:17]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• ICE Expansion & Recruitment: [00:11] – [01:34]
• Training Facilities and Protocols: [02:44] – [04:25]
• Training Duration and Content: [04:25] – [05:26]
• Field Training and Officer Influence: [05:55] – [06:50]
• Culture and Supervision in Law Enforcement: [06:50] – [07:57]
• Legal/Institutional Accountability: [08:00] – [08:53]

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Takeaways

• ICE’s massive growth has not been matched by transparent, consistent training improvements; in fact, the training appears shorter and less robust in key areas such as language skills.
• Expert consensus suggests that the agency’s internal culture and leadership decisions have a greater effect on agent behavior than curriculum alone.
• There is substantial skepticism that legal or financial risks will motivate reforms in ICE’s training or operating procedures—raising concerns about ongoing controversies as mass immigration enforcement continues.

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Next episode preview:
The following episode will examine ICE’s conversion of warehouses into detention centers as a further step in the ongoing immigration crackdown.

Transcript

[Mark Brown]

Npr.

[Waylon Wong]

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong.

[Darian Woods]

And I'm Darian Woods. In the last year, the Department of Homeland Security says 12,000 new agents and officers have joined U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This was an unprecedented hiring boom that more than doubled ICE's ranks.

[Waylon Wong]

The agency was aggressive in its recruitment efforts. It waived age requirements and offered signing bonuses of up to $50,000. The Department of Homeland Security says it's deploying agents to remove the, quote, worst of the worst from the U.S. this.

[Darian Woods]

Large ramp up has turned ICE into arguably one of the fastest growing and most scrutinized workplaces in the country right now. That's because its performance is highly visible and at times questionable. The majority of immigrants caught up in this crackdown have no criminal convict. Many have legal status and even US Citizens have been taken into custody.

[Waylon Wong]

Recent surveys show an increasing number of Americans saying the immigration crackdown has gone too far. Some politicians and community leaders are even calling for ICE to be dismantled. Others say they need better training or a culture shift or both. Are those changes needed and would they even make a difference? Today on the show, law enforcement experts and former officers assessment DHS's performance.

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[Waylon Wong]

The Trump administration's massive tax and spending law gave $750 million to something called the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers. These are the facilities that train recruits, ICE, U.S. border Patrol, and U.S. customs and Border Protection.

[Mark Brown]

Mark Brown taught at the main campus near Brunswick, Georgia for five years.

I enjoy training. I like when the light bulb goes off, so to speak.

The Georgia facility is so big that it has its own zip code. There are dorms, classrooms, and shooting ranges. There's even a mini replica of a city spread out over more than 35 acres.

It has storefronts, shops, federal buildings. And then you have like neighborhoods behind it where you have houses, you have duplexes, trailers, apartment style buildings. Because when we would teach crowd control, we would go over there, we would use that city to be, to show them, okay, this is how you're going to line up on the street.

[Waylon Wong]

So Mark would get the trainees lined up on the street of this fake city and he would tell them, this is what you do if you're trying to arrest someone and a crowd starts to form, or maybe there are protesters.

[Mark Brown]

If they're protesting on the sideline, on the sidewalk, they have the right to protest your presence. So that's not something for you to engage in. And then as soon as your person is handcuffed, let's get them up and get them out of there. Like, we don't need to stick around. We don't talk to the crowd. We're not actively going back and forth. We're not here to debate their points. They're allowed to protest our presence. That's fine. Our biggest thing is keeping everybody safe.

Mark says he's not seeing those protocols in some of the videos of federal agents that are circulating. And that makes him wonder about the training that the newly recruited ICE or CBP agents are getting or not getting.

[Waylon Wong]

So how much instruction do new ICE recruits get? Well, there's been a lot of contradictory information on this, including from the government.

[Mark Brown]

Different officials within the DHS have said that the training for immigration agents has been shortened. At the same time, the agency says.

[Darian Woods]

Media outlets are spreading lies about ICE training.

[Waylon Wong]

We reached out to DHS for clarification. Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told us that officers are getting the same number of training hours.

[Mark Brown]

Here's what we were able to figure out based on the numbers we got from DHS. New ICE recruits get 14 weeks of training. This is fewer weeks than what ICE agents were previously getting. It's also shorter than the national average for state and local law enforcement officers.

[Waylon Wong]

Matthew Ross is an economist at Northeastern University who studies police training. He says he's concerned that the program for ICE officers has changed significantly in a short amount of time.

[Matthew Ross]

I think there's a lot of reasons to be quite worried about what the long term implications of that are going to look like. And even what we're seeing, sort of seeing in places like Minneapolis, it might be a direct result of that.

[Waylon Wong]

One major change in the ICE training has to do with learning Spanish. Previously, new ICE agents got five weeks of Spanish instruction. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told us that the agency replaced those classes with translation services covering multiple languages. It is not clear what those services are.

[Mark Brown]

Matthew says he's also concerned that ICE recruits aren't getting enough high quality field training. That's when new offices are paired with more experienced ones to learn on the job.

[Waylon Wong]

Matthew and some other researchers studied field training using data from the Dallas Police Department. They found that if a recruit was assigned to a more aggressive field training officer, that recruit was significantly more likely to use force.

[Matthew Ross]

The furthest we could look out just based on the data we had was three years. And from what it from as far as we can tell, if you happen to get paired up with a, with a field training officer that used force frequently, you were just more likely to use force for the entirety of that three year period. And in fact, it could be true that you just use force more for the rest of your career.

[Mark Brown]

In other words, new law enforcement officers model their behavior after more experienced ones. And direction from senior officers, whether explicit or implicit, could be a bigger influence on new recruits than their formal training. That's according to Steph Stoughton. He's a law professor at the University of South Carolina and a policing expert. He's also a former police officer himself.

[Steph Stoughton]

I would be shocked if some of what we see that's problematic in the way that ICE agents and CBP agents are handling these various tasks. I would be shocked if it's actually a training failure at this point because some of the agents that have been publicly identified are long standing veterans.

[Waylon Wong]

Case in point, in Minneapolis, US Citizen Alex Preddy appeared to be recording agents on his cell phone as an observer. The two agents who shot and killed him have been since 2014 and 2018, according to ProPublica.

[Steph Stoughton]

Doesn't matter how you're trained. If your supervisor says you run up to those cars and if they don't get out immediately, you break the windows. Even if you are trained to not do that, even if you were trained about why that's a really bad tactic, about why that's likely to provoke resistance, about how that's likely to contribute to an otherwise avoidable use of force. And if that's what you're told to do by your supervisor, and if that's what you think the peers around you expect you to do, that's what you're going to do.

[Mark Brown]

Both Seth and economist Matthew Ross say they expect the administration to face multiple lawsuits over how ICE and other federal agencies are conducting their immigration crackdown. Seth, however, doesn't believe that the specter of costly future legal settlements will motivate the administration to change its current tactics.

[Steph Stoughton]

One of the things that we've seen from ice, at least and from cbp is an approach to accountability that I think communicates to agents that it's just performative. That really removes one of the legs from the stool that we use to get officers and agents to perform as professionals. The financial incentives alone probably aren't going to do anything, especially not with an agency that just views that as the cost of doing business.

[Waylon Wong]

For her part, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told us that ICE recruits get the same training they always have. By the way, DHS confirmed to NPR on Tuesday that McLaughlin will be leaving the agency. She's been the administration's public face in defending the mass deportation policy over the last year.

[Darian Woods]

Tomorrow on the Indicator, we look at how ICE is planning to spend over 38 billion doll turning large warehouses into detention centers as part of its immigration crackdown.

[Waylon Wong]

This episode was produced by Julia Ricci with engineering by Jimmy Keeley. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Kicking Cannon is our show's editor, and the indicator is a production of npr.

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