President Donald Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia. It is the ICE personal-fitness test.
More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.
“It’s pathetic,” one career ICE official told me, adding that before now, a typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous.
The academy’s standards have already been eased to boost recruitment, he said, and the new parameters “should be the minimum for any officer.” He and others, none of whom were authorized to speak with reporters, told me that agency veterans are concerned about the quality of the new recruits being fast-tracked onto the street to meet Trump’s hiring goals.
Chasing farm workers across a field requires some level of fitness and these Xbox commandos aren't anywhere near up to the challenge. The fear is that, like the old-type fat-assed Southern sheriffs, that these porkers will opt to shoot people and then claim some fictitious justification for doing that.
