This professor is concerned that rapid hiring of ICE agents means inadequate background checks

Protests continued here and around the country over the weekend following the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman who was shot through the windshield of her car by an ICE agent last week.

The killing has been defended by the Trump administration as self defense but local officials in Minneapolis disagree — and tensions are reaching a fever pitch in cities around the county as people take to the streets demanding justice for Good — and a stop to ICE raids.

And it all comes as news broke that ICE plans to target Phoenix next in its mass deportation campaign.

Well, The Show's next guest this morning says this escalation was inevitable. ICE has ramped up hiring of new agents in a major way in recent months. The government announced last July they wanted to hire 10,000 new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.

And, they’re being hired with the goal of carrying out what the president has called the largest mass deportation campaign of all time.

Joe Heyman is professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso and director of the Center for Interamerican and Border Studies. He’s studied ICE and Border Patrol for decades. The Show spoke with him more about this shooting death by an ICE officer and asked, is he surprised?

Full conversation

JOE HEYMAN: I'm shocked and deeply concerned, but not surprised. If you send thousands of agents into the field to arrest people, to sort of sweep them out of society, and they're right in the middle of everyday life in the United States, these sorts of things are inevitably going to happen. They're not just individual one-off, you know, bad incidents. They're a systematic pattern.

I mean, the one thing I would say that I think people wouldn't really know is that this kind of stuff has happened off and on, but over time consistently at the U.S.-Mexico border itself. And so the rest of the United States is experiencing what has been a long-time pattern at the border.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so let's talk about why that is, right? You've done extensive research on this on the border and within immigration enforcement for, it sounds like, decades. and, you know, produced a report not too long ago talking about how caution is needed before hiring more Border Patrol and ICE officers.

We've seen this massive uptick in hiring from the Trump administration, efforts to hire thousands of new officers. What are your concerns there?

HEYMAN: Well, I have a particular concern with not checking their background adequately, making excuses for problematic past histories, you know, people who were police officers, local police officers, but were disciplined, who are trying to move on, for example.

You know, everything is going to be swept under the rug in order to meet enormous rapid hiring quotas. And this has, this is not just something that we imagine might happen because it was what happened in the post-9/11 hiring surge, with the creation of Department of Homeland Security and a huge number of people being hired into, especially Customs and Border Protection.

GILGER: So we've seen this in the past. I mean, so, I mean, that's one level of concern, right? That, that background checks will not be complete, et cetera. But I mean, I wonder just on another level, just rushing a lot of people into positions like these would have a lot of power.

Uh, I mean, are requirements being lessened? It sounds like the, the amount of training is being lessened, people are getting you know, incentivize, there's signup bonuses, high pay, student loan forgiveness, that kind of thing.

HEYMAN: Yeah, I think that the things that are being incentivized are not just the money that they're getting to be hired, but also what the rewards are going to be for the kind of job they're doing.

So right now, the rewards are going to be for maximizing arrests, mass enforcement. sweeping people out of the community. There are some kind of a steady number of cases that we're seeing of U.S. citizens being arrested and held.

So I think that the incentives are not just the money that people are getting to be hired, but also the incentives to be successful at grabbing people out of society.

GILGER: So this is what you mean when you say you're not surprised this is a systemic problem within this department, these departments. It's about priorities.

HEYMAN: It's about priorities. People, you know, in organizations are sensitive to the kinds of messages they get about what is acceptable and tolerable, what is actually rewarded, what is encouraged, how can you move up in the ranks. All of those are messages that you should, you know, cut corners, be aggressive. There are dangerous people who are after us as law enforcement.

People in law enforcement do know legitimately that it's a job with some potential danger. I mean, it's by no means the most dangerous job, but they know to be aware that they're dealing with people who might resist or might flee or might be in a dangerous situation. And that can be turned into a kind of an attitude that everybody outside of the organization is dangerous.

I've heard that often from DHS, from Custom Border Protection and from ICE. And that is a concerning thing because those are the cases where people make snap judgments that are dangerous judgments, judgments to shoot or judgments to date, dangerous pursuits.

I don't think people, you know, we're just getting the news about actual shootings, which are the worst. But I think out there for actually in this past year, it's been terrible here in El Paso, dangerous pursuits.

So there's a, if you send signals out to people that you're, it's us against the world, and the world is dangerous, and if you send signals out that you need to be as aggressive as possible to make as many arrests as possible, then you're going to shift the balance of all these little subtle decisions and judgments that law enforcement officers do have to make. You're shifting the balance of those towards the higher risk, more dangerous types of decisions.

GILGER: So, I mean, you mentioned having talked to officers who kind of have said that to you, have espoused that point of view. Tell us more about the time you spent in, you know, embedded, doing field research, as you would call it as an anthropologist, with ICE agents or with border patrol agents. Like, the culture seems to be at play here?

HEYMAN: Yeah, I mean, there are diverse organizations, there are diverse individuals and diverse organizations, and so, one can't simply lay the same thing on everybody in the same way. But these are organizations that have enforced the law against people who are marginalized and voiceless in society. And so they don't have as much experience as local law enforcement does with the kind of checks and balances that are put on by the, you know, being part of local society.

GILGER: Right.

HEYMAN: And local law enforcement has these problems, but really they're kind of a, you know, an imposed force in these communities. And I especially think if we're getting a whole lot of people recruited and put on the streets very rapidly, that's gonna worsen that imposed force.

GILGER: Let me ask you, lastly, the Trump administration is not going to stop its deportation campaign anytime soon, it seems. We're not getting rid of these agents on the mass. Is there a way to do this right, to train them the right way? Are there examples of that happening when you need to hire a lot of people, you could do it well.

HEYMAN: There are examples of improved training, for sure. One of the problems is that they're being pushed through so quickly. They're cutting back on the amount of time for training.

One of the things that I saw that concerned me a great deal is that they're cutting back on the time for language training, specifically in Spanish. They're using translation software on people's phones, which is just not going to be adequate.

One of the things that part of that common sense that a senior officer told me, somebody in immigration enforcement said, you know, he said he thought that bad things happened when officers couldn't speak Spanish. And so they were shouting out commands to people who didn't understand what they wanted.

GILGER: Yeah.

HEYMAN: You know, that's not really that difficult, but I think it's all being bypassed and it's being bypassed because they don't, they want to rush people to the organization. It's also being bypassed because the attitude is why should we be polite to immigrants?