ICE hiring surge challenges county law enforcement

Key Takeaways

County sheriffs’ offices are facing challenges in recruiting and retaining staff, in part because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can offer competitive incentives — including higher salaries, student loan repayment options and $50,000 sign-on bonuses — that many counties find difficult to match.

Starting in August, ICE began sending recruitment emails and letters to local deputies across the country, inviting them to join its workforce during a “critical time” for the nation.

A recruitment email reads: “Your experience in state or local law enforcement brings invaluable insight and skills to this mission — qualities we need now more than ever. ICE is actively recruiting officers like you who are committed to serving with integrity, professionalism and a deep sense of duty. 

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“This is more than a job; it’s a continuation of your service to our country and an opportunity to work alongside dedicated professionals on the frontlines of national security.”

The National Sheriffs’ Association was unaware that there was an active recruitment plan of local deputies before the letters started streaming in, as were county sheriffs across the country, which is a point of frustration, according to Jonathan Thompson, who is retiring from the National Sheriffs’ Association at the end of this year after serving as its CEO for a decade.

“Had we known about what the plans were, we could have advised them on how best to approach this,” Thompson said. “But instead, what we’re finding now is that much of it is becoming a surprise to the sheriffs, when somebody submits a resignation: ‘Hey, I’m going to work for ICE.’

“… Federal partners need to recognize that you can’t rob Peter to pay Paul here. And that’s unfortunately what happened.”

Some county sheriffs’ offices are in talks with their state legislatures about the ability to offer some additional incentives of their own to retain staff, such as bonuses or waiving education costs, according to Thompson.

“When the federal government is recruiting against you, they have deeper pockets and a far healthier set of benefits in many cases,” Thompson said. “And that makes it rugged.”

Something local governments have in their favor is that joining ICE is an agreement to uproot your life, which some people aren’t interested in, Thompson noted. 

“When you join ICE, or you join the federal government, you’re subject to where the work is needed,” Thompson said. “You’re going to be relocated, and you’re going to have certain obligations that you may not face in a county sheriff's office or at a police department.”

Thompson is aware of a few dozen agencies, so far, that have had deputies leave to work for ICE, and more will be affected as time goes on, he said. 

“Counties and sheriffs’ offices are really going to feel this, whether it’s a few dozen — which I suspect it’s a lot more than a few dozen — but, with 3,081 sheriffs across the country, if you lose one per agency, that’s quite a few. 

“That’s a lot of investment that the counties and sheriffs have put into these people, and that’s troublesome.”

Sheriffs’ offices put tens of thousands of dollars into the hiring and training process for each deputy, according to Canadian County, Okla. Sheriff Chris West, president of the National Sheriffs’ Association.

When a deputy leaves, the office not only has to fill the vacant position but also must absorb the associated costs again — including recruitment, background checks and police academy training.

“You run somebody through a probation period, you send them to the basic police officer academy, you get them back and you have a sizable investment in them,” West said. “And if they work for you for six months or a year, and somebody offers them a better paying job, now you have to go through that whole cycle again.”

One Canadian County deputy has left to work for ICE, according to West. 

“Everybody wants the best,” West said. “And the more that you’re able to offer, the higher pay, the better the benefits, the better the retirement package and those things — at the end of the day, that speaks to people.”

Canyon County, Idaho is one of the fastest-growing counties in the country — between 2010 and 2022, its population increased by 32.6% — and many of its deputies, according to Sheriff Kieran Donahue, are struggling to make rent, let alone buy a house, so the perks of joining ICE are something that will be difficult for them to refuse. 

“A $50,000 signing bonus is probably a down payment on a house,” Donahue said. “So, that’s going to be extremely attractive to these men and women who are struggling to make ends meet on the wages that law enforcement is able to pay them.”

State and local law enforcement have faced an ongoing struggle with recruitment and retention, and ICE poaching their staff is exacerbating the issue, according to Donahue. 

Idaho Public Safety is currently down 40 state troopers, “with no hope of gaining ground in a competitive market salary analysis, with zero hope of retaining,” Donahue said. “And their fear is that at some point, there will be such a negative loss that they may cease to exist.

“That’s how devastating this is.”

Up until two years ago, the Canyon County Sheriff’s Office could not offer a competitive market salary, and roughly one-third of its jail staff positions were open, leading Donahue and his chief deputy to analyze how much it was costing the county for its deputies to regularly leave for higher salaries. 

“We had to start mandatory overtime,” Donahue said. “It didn’t matter whether they wanted to work, they’re going to work — it was that dismal. And when you do that, now you’ve really hurt the morale, and fatigue and burnout becomes a big issue.”

Presenting the report to the county board resulted in a $900,000 increase in funding for salaries in the Sheriff’s Office, which helped retain staff and offset its $2 million deficit, according to Donahue. Other county sheriffs’ offices need to be proactive right now in analyzing their data and putting together a strategic plan, he noted.   

“When those people walk out the door, we are losing millions of dollars,” Donahue said. “… If counties do not do a deep dive on a market salary analysis as to how much money is going out the door, because they’re not appropriating the correct market salary to these individuals, they’re foolish. 

“If we don’t do that, then this approach by ICE, by [the Department of Homeland Security], is going to be even more catastrophic.”

Localities, on a wide scale, can’t compete with the incentives ICE is offering, and it will disproportionately affect smaller, more rural counties with smaller tax revenue bases, Donahue noted. 

The average national rate for rural county sheriffs’ departments is 1.1 employee per 1,000 population, according to estimates from the Office of Justice Programs. And in extremely remote counties with under 500 residents, a sheriff's office may only have one or two deputies. 

Some rural counties are eliminating parts of their onboarding process, such as the polygraph examination, to cut down on costs and speed up filling a position, according to Donahue. 

“Rural counties, they’re lowering their standards,” Donahue said. “They’re moving away from required polygraph examination as part of the background to get into that agency, and once you do that, now who are you hiring? 

“If we’re dropping those standards — and we can’t, but people are — just to try to fill those positions, that has its own catastrophic cascading effect.”

The National Sheriffs’ Association has been in contact with the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security about opportunities to work together and ensure localities are adequately staffed, according to Thompson.

“But you can’t just direct ‘X’ number of dollars to an agency merely because they lost an employee to the federal government,” Thompson said. “There’re some limitations on that, and there’re some constitutional issues there too, so we’ve asked them to look at this very closely, and I know that they are, not just from a legal, but also a financial perspective. 

“They’ve got an awful lot of Homeland Security dollars that are available for these agencies to support homeland security missions across the board.”

Ultimately, it’s at the local level that this will be felt, so the National Sheriffs’ Association is advising county sheriffs’ offices to take stock of everything from wages and benefits to hiring and promotion enhancement procedures and identify any opportunities to incentivize its deputies to stay, Thompson said. 

“We’re going to have to put thinking caps on and be creative about how we try and either work around or work through this situation,” Thompson said. “It’s not cataclysmic, but it’s a challenge. There’s no doubt about it.”