As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ramps up hiring, one of the first stops new officers make is to a training center just outside of Savannah, Georgia.
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) is preparing to train up to 10,000 new ICE officers, as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s deportation efforts, and members of the media were given access to see the “lifecycle of a recruit.”
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, a graduate of the FLETC training course in 2007, told ABC News the agency is confident they’ll be able to staff up 10,000 new officers by the end of the year.
“We are taking a whole of government approach,” he told ABC News. “We have to be cognizant of who we are hiring, but I think it is an achievable goal.”
The process starts with a security screening and background check, once that passes, the entire time can take as little as eight weeks from training to an officer is on the street, according to ICE.
The training center is run by former ICE Acting Director Caleb Vitello, who said the agency cut the Spanish language portion of the training to speed up the hiring timeline.
Instead, ICE uses Spanish language software in the field which is faster, according to Vitello.
“The recruits here know the staff training them are professionals, and experts in the job they do,” Lyons said while standing outside of the recruit obstacle course.
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Both Lyons and Vitello stressed that they did not want to compromise the quality of officers for quantity. The training academy runs more classes and goes six days a week, according to ICE, and they have four different sites around the country in which they run training.
Lyons said ICE can be picky about who is recruited because of the more than 121,000 applications the agency has received.
ABC News observed the Special Operations Team, a 12-person elite tactical training team, clear a house that is used for training purposes. That team is deployed when the threat levels are high and when they need to serve a warrant. There is one in every field office around the country, according to ICE.
Other law enforcement agencies, such as the Bureau of Prisons, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), also train at the center.
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Lyons was also asked by ABC News about the masks worn by ICE officers. He said they are necessary because of the doxxing — the malicious sharing of personal information — he says agents are facing.
“I wish our officers didn’t have to wear them,” Lyons said. “You have this crazy rhetoric where people are calling for threats against ICE officers and threats to agents.”
During the Biden administration and at the beginning of the Trump administration, Lyons said ICE officers weren’t wearing masks, but he said now the threat has increased.
“People are trying to identify them and post their photos online, dox them, threaten their families, it’s totally unacceptable,” Lyons said. “What we need is elected officials to work with us to hold these people accountable that dox ICE agents.”
