The Department of Homeland Security recently boasted that it has hired more than 12,000 ICE officers and agents in just four months—a feat that merely required lowering standards, fast-tracking barely vetted recruits, and turning availability into the primary eligibility requirement. That’s an exaggeration, but hardly. More than doubling ICE’s ranks has meant cutting training from 13 weeks to six, raising the maximum age cap from 40 to none at all, scrapping the college degree requirement, and adding a $50,000 signing bonus. Now pretty much anyone can become an ICE agent. And that’s not just because of those lax standards, but also because DHS is apparently doing a piss-poor job of ensuring even those are met.

A Slate journalist, for example, was offered an officer position despite their never submitting paperwork, taking the fitness test, passing drug screening, or undergoing a background check. Last week, it was revealed that ICE’s résumé-sorting AI tool mistakenly flagged many applicants as former law enforcement, accidentally putting them on an even shorter four-week, online-only training track. The ICE agent filmed fatally shooting Alex Pretti in the head, execution style, has been identified by the AP as an eight-year veteran with the Border Patrol. Renee Good was fatally, needlessly killed by an ICE agent who had been on the job for more than a decade, working in the Border Patrol prior to that. If seasoned ICE officers are killing civilians in the streets, DHS’s negligence in screening new hires should make us all concerned about whom the agency is allowing to be emboldened by impunity.

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