The Goon Squad Salaries, Signing Bonuses and Requirements
(Guardian UK) “ICE plans $100m yearlong ‘wartime recruitment’ media blitz to attract new agents Campaign will target rightwing ideologues to fill ranks to meet Trump deportation goals in 2026.”
Well, that certainly settles my mind.
I was very much afraid ‘rightwing idealogues’ might have difficulty finding additional ways to attack Democrat-majority citizens in cities such as Minneapolis and Portland. That’s the deal, you know. There are no ICE storm-troopers in any Republican areas nationwide.
“As ICE looks to hire for thousands of new positions, flush with cash after an unprecedented influx from Congress last summer, it’s relying on geofencing to ensure people near military bases, Nascar races, gun and trade shows, and college campuses receive its recruitment ads, according to an internal document reported by the Washington Post.”
A new word every day for this old man. Geofencing, ‘a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area.’ You probably knew that, and I kinda got it from context, but now I have a better clue as to where Maga hangs out. College campuses surprised me a bit, but it’s 72 years since I was at Michigan State. Ertha Kitt, Harry Belafonte and Tom Lehrer were big back then.
“Yet,” the Guardian goes on to explain, “even as ICE now has the funds to hire about 14,000 new employees, its efforts to quickly do so have raised red flags among everyday citizens disgusted by the recruitment ads themselves, and experts concerned that the speed and tone with which the federal government is pursuing new agents could attract more aggressive, combat-hungry applicants.”
A bit hard to envision more aggressive or combat hungry from what I’ve seen, but then I don’t hang out at gun shows, and have avoided military bases ever since being drafted, a long way back.
It’s the incentives worry me.
“ICE’s controversial ads have leaned heavily on American symbolism – Uncle Sam, George Washington, Lady Liberty – while casting immigrants as bad actors to convince potential deportation officers to apply.
“Meanwhile, ICE is offering an up to $50,000 signing bonus, higher than the real median personal income for a year’s work in the US, as well as up to $60,000 in student loan repayment for those who join.”
That ought to whip up whatever remains unwhipped on college campuses. Trump cancelled whatever attempts Joe Biden made in that direction, but I suppose a president who associates demonstrations against Israeli genocide with antisemitism hasn’t much understanding of university life. Must be bone-spurs, either that or indigestion.
But Trump’s Maga minions are tearer-downers instead of builder-uppers.
I understand that. They’ve lost most middle class livelihood over the past couple of generations, and they want it back or all hell will break loose. ICE is one of the gravyest of trains to pull into the station in decades. The pay range is $51,600 to $84,300 a year, and a chance to whup as many illegals as you can catch, and the best part is you don’t even have to prove ‘em illegal in court. It’s just like catch and release fishing, with no release required.
There may be quotas, essentially ‘bounties’ for arrests. ICE is quiet on that, but ICE is a subterranean animal and seldom communicates with the outside world. While no envelope of cash changes hands, the system rewards higher arrest activity in multiple indirect ways. Arrest numbers are tracked as output, and overtime increases with enforcement volume. At current pay rates, and almost necessarily working ‘away from home,’ overtime can be huge.
So, while there’s no official bounty, the structure of evaluations, overtime, political pressure, and detention economics creates powerful incentives to maximize arrests, which is why critics often call it a de facto bounty system, even though legally it isn’t one.
Requirements are U.S. citizenship, a valid driver’s license, fitness and clearance.
Which is pretty thin, but there’s a thing about requirements…they’re flexible. Sorta like statistics, if you torture them sufficiently, they will confess to anything.
ICE has already received more than 220,000 applications and made more than 18,000 tentative job offers, sometimes on the spot. At an ICE recruitment fair in Arlington, Texas, more than a hundred people were waiting outside before the event started. Attendees told the New York Times they were there because they were ‘very patriotic’ and committed to ‘guarding the homeland.’
Considering that the ‘homeland’ (how I hate that word) they refer to was the home of native inhabitants for 12,000 years before we even got here, they’re a bit late in the ‘guarding’ department. Regarding further that what comes to mind when we celebrate an America ‘from sea to shining sea,’ in its present state, was (and is) an entirely immigrant manifestation. The first to tread our land, all those 12,000 years ago, emigrated from what is now northeastern Siberia and crossed into (what is now) Alaska, over the Bering Land Bridge during the last Ice Age.
‘What was then and what is now’ is entirely a story of immigration.
I pretty much decided long ago that white America is simply scared shitless of becoming a minority, and manifests those fears by calling them what they are not.
White, brown, black, and all other shades of Americans, made of us the strongest and richest nation on earth…and the billionaire class ground that shared prosperity into the mud, simply by wanting it all. If you’re looking for someone to blame, take a gander at who stood with Donald Trump at his inauguration, essentially crowning him as one of their own.
Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai knew that happy days were here again. They were finally going to get it all.
But you know what? That’s not what they want, and they don’t even realize it. They got it all, because the machine they built did the work. And now, it’s all there and it’s not enough. All is worthless.
Who knew?
What’s gone is the joy of building the machine, the same joy of building they took away from the middle class and sent to China.
And, if you don’t think China is having a great time with what they sent, you haven’t been paying attention. The tallest bridges in the world, high-speed rail, magnificently designed museums, factories, and social structures… things of joy, because they are things of building, of creation, of absolutely unnecessary beauty. Frank Lloyd Wright would have loved China for those values. America sees it as a rising and (perhaps) evil competitor, because what we threw away for money was the joy that creation brings to the soul.
The billionaires won, and found it a hollow victory, without joy.
But it’s there, in the very immigrants ICE runs down and deports like rabbits in a sack. Immigration is the joy of creating. Coming with nothing, turning nothing into tiny restaurants, where they wash their own dishes to scrimp on costs, work sixteen-hour days to send their kids to school to become Americans, and do better than their parents.
That’s creation.
That’s where you and I came from, as immigrants, one or two or three generations back. Those people, the same people we chase into prisons and separate from their children, are the hope, sweat, and creative joy we once had…and sold for money.
They’re out there now.
We dare not chase them down and send them back.
Architect Mies van der Rohe was wrong. Less is not more, less is less and always will be. More is in the joyful immigrant who built America.
Disband ICE, send them home to do useful work. Go find those immigrants and throw a block-party, all music, food and apologies. Invite Elon, Zuck, and Jeff, knowing in full confidence that they will not come.
Celebrate the joy of building something great, just one more time…