A whistleblower is claiming that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dangerously lowered its hiring standards for new recruits, who were given final job offers without undergoing even preliminary vetting.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the whistleblower, who has worked at ICE for 17 years, filed a complaint in August 2025 with the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security that sounded alarms about what he described as an “unprecedented lowering of standards” for hiring.

According to the complaint, applicants were offered jobs before they they even passed fingerprint and identity checks, which the whistleblower said created “grave national security risks” for the agency.

In an interview with the Times, the whistleblower said that ICE “chose… to be more convenient rather than thorough,” even though “there was a potential to put lives at risk and jeopardize national security.”

This is at least the second whistleblower complaint to raise concerns about the deterioration of standards at ICE.

In February, former ICE lawyer Ryan Schwank alleged in a complaint that he “received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”

Schwank also alleged that “the legally required training program at the ICE academy is deficient, defective, and broken,” which he warned “can and will get people killed.”

ICE’s hiring standards came under scrutiny this summer after it was revealed that ICE agent David Brouillette, who fatally shot a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant named Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, had a lengthy history of allegedly abusive behavior.

As noted by the Times, Brouillette was even rejected for a job at the police department in Hallowell, Maine because he had “too many red flags.”

The ICE hiring surge came shortly after passage of the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated more than $170 billion in funding for immigration enforcement operations. ICE last year said it would use some of the money to hire 10,000 additional agents, more than double the number of agents who had previously worked at the department.

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