ICE's 'Athletically Allergic' Recruits

[Celerity]

Push-ups, sit-ups, and a brisk jog pose a threat to Trump’s deportation campaign.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/10/ice-recruits-fitness-test-trump/684625/

https://archive.ph/lPHjz



President Donald Trump’s plan to double the size of the ICE workforce has met a foe more powerful than any activist group. It is decimating new recruits at the agency’s training academy in Georgia. It is the ICE personal-fitness test. More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.

“It’s pathetic,” one career ICE official told me, adding that before now, a typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous. The academy’s standards have already been eased to boost recruitment, he said, and the new parameters “should be the minimum for any officer.” He and others, none of whom were authorized to speak with reporters, told me that agency veterans are concerned about the quality of the new recruits being fast-tracked onto the street to meet Trump’s hiring goals.

An email from ICE headquarters to the agency’s top officials on October 5 lamented that “a considerable amount of athletically allergic candidates” had been showing up to the academy; they had “misrepresented” their physical condition on application forms. The email directed leaders at ICE’s field offices to conduct preliminary fitness exams with new recruits before sending them to the academy. “We all know the self-certification method has failed,” Ralph Ferguson, an operations official at ICE headquarters, wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told me in a statement that the one-third failure rate reflected only “a subset of candidates in initial basic academy classes,” and not all new hires. She said DHS expects to fill 85 percent of new deportation-officer positions with experienced law-enforcement officials whom they can fast-track. Although they will not be required to pass a fitness test at the ICE academy, “they remain subject to medical, fitness, and background requirements,” McLaughlin wrote.

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