Garrett Graff writes:

[I]t turns out, if you’re hiring for a pariah agency using nakedly fascist and racist messaging and recruiting for a job where you get to be jeered by your neighbors and are so hated that you literally refuse to show your face, and trying to attract people who will get excited to cos-play as a Navy SEAL in full tactical gear to dress up like you’re taking Fallujah while facing down people in inflatable frog costumes and wrestling to the ground hard-working roofers in the Home Depot parking lot, America’s best, brightest, and most fit don’t apply.

Early in the summer, I wrote about the experience and history of the hiring surge post-9/11 by Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol. I actually spent five years covering the wave of crime and corruption that overwhelmed CBP afterward — a tidal wave so huge that from 2005 to 2012, there were a total of 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents — meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years — and that even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, that pace of arrest had only slowed to one CBP agent or officer arrested every 36 hours.

As I wrote in early July, “What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.”

Now we’re getting the first reports from the front lines of ICE’s recruiting and hiring drive — and it’s going precisely as poorly as predicted. As CNN quoted an administration official last week, “It’s a shit show.” [Continue reading…]