A Former ICE Official, Scott Shuchart, Is Worried That the Agency Is About to Go on a Hiring Spree of Proud Boys

Source: Slate Magazine

A Former ICE Official Is Worried That the Agency Is About to Go on a Hiring Spree of Proud Boys

Shirin Ali
Thu, July 17, 2025 at 1:49 PM EDT
6 min read

In the 22 years since Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created to identify and eliminate border security threats, Congress has again and again failed to reform the badly broken immigration system that ICE polices. That failure has fostered a culture of grievance at ICE and its sister agencies, and Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration position has only indulged that siege mentality. Now, in an effort to push agents to achieve his mass deportation agenda, Trump has granted the agency a massive, record-breaking cash infusion, while in the same stroke, he eliminated the oversight bodies that are supposed to regulate ICE’s actions. One former top ICE official says that there’s a worryingly real possibility that the incoming agents will be seeded from “Proud Boys and other insurrectionists.” Whether or not that nightmare scenario is realized, the results of Trump’s agent expansion and oversight contraction will likely spell disaster for civil liberties across the country.

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Meanwhile, the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill awarded ICE $29.9 billion for enforcement and deportation operations—a threefold increase of their current annual budget. Even more funding will be provided to hire 10,000 new immigration enforcement agents, intended to push “the rate of deportations to reach as high as 1 million per year,” Noem announced. All in all, DHS, which oversees ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Customs and Border Protection, secured $165 billion in the new legislation.

Scott Shuchart, former assistant director of ICE under the Biden administration, does not believe the agency is capable of spending this money responsibly. “This administration is led by criminals, and they’re going to keep doing unlawful and terrible things,” he told me. It’s hard to keep track of just how unprecedented, expansive, and legally questionable the Trump administration’s push on immigration enforcement has been, from arresting immigrants at courthouses and revoking legal status from hundreds of thousands of people to targeting birthright citizenship. It’s led to a massive wave of lawsuits, which the federal government is mostly losing.

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Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-ice-official-worried-agency-174928957.html