Trump’s WashingtonHow President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.
Good evening. Last month I asked you, the readers of this newsletter, to share your questions about immigration. We plan to answer a selection of them right here with the help of my colleagues across the newsroom. We’re starting tonight with a question that gets at something several of you want to know about the Trump administration’s effort to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers as it seeks to ramp up deportations. What is the process of recruiting new ICE agents? Where does this take place, and who is signing up? For the answer, I turned to Nicholas Nehamas, a reporter who covers the ways President Trump is transforming the federal government. Nick recently took a firsthand look at that recruitment process, and below, he’ll explain what he saw. — Jess Bidgood
Meet the new ICE recruits
Roughly 3,000 people showed up late last month at a two-day hiring fair for Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside Dallas, Texas. I went to observe. An assembly-line style setup greeted me inside an arena usually reserved for e-sports competitions and video gaming. Turn in your résumé at this table here. Have your fingerprints taken there. Go to the bathroom around the corner for your drug test. Military veteran or current law enforcement officer? Skip the line. Fairs like this, which ICE plans to hold in cities across the country, are a key part of the agency’s push to hire more than 14,400 new employees by the end of the year, thanks to tens of billions of dollars in funding from Trump’s domestic policy bill. That’s a major expansion of its work force, which currently numbers around 21,500. ICE is offering significant financial incentives to help meet its hiring goal, including a signing bonus of up to $50,000 (parceled out over five years) and help paying down student debt. And it has waived age requirements and streamlined training to get more ICE agents onto the street with the stated mission of detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. The strategy appears to be working. ICE says it has received more than 140,000 applications. At the Texas job fair, I met some of those applicants, and witnessed the speed with which the agency is moving to bring people on board. There, ICE made nearly 700 job offers, conditional on applicants passing medical, background and drug tests, according to a spokesman. Despite the Trump administration’s aggressive social media presence, which has relied heavily on nationalist sentiments, the atmosphere felt more like a sober professional expo than a MAGA rally. There was no music and only a smattering of red caps. A video playing on loop about the agency’s history dated from the Biden administration and gave Ken Burns documentary vibes, although “Defend the Homeland” signage was displayed prominently. And the applicants who showed up included a large number of working-class African American and Hispanic men, reflecting Trump’s winning coalition in the 2024 election. Some of the applicants were immigrants themselves, or the children of them. My colleagues Kassie Bracken, Andrew Cagle and I talked to naturalized citizens from Bangladesh, Bulgaria and Nigeria who wanted to join the agency. Other potential recruits had parents and grandparents born in Latin America. Aside from large numbers of cops and military vets, a contingent of uniformed Transportation Security Administration workers — a sister agency to ICE — came in to drop off résumés. One told me ICE’S pay was too good to pass up. One applicant I spoke with was Mahin Ahmed, 30, a college student who said he had become an American citizen after emigrating from Bangladesh at the age of 16. He told me he wanted to become a deportation officer both because he was tired of “living life paycheck to paycheck” and because he believed Joe Biden’s border policies had allowed “a lot of bad people” into the United States. “It’s not fair that my family has to go through a legal process, takes us about 15 to 20 years,” Ahmed said. “It’s not fair that someone can just hop across the border, have some babies, the kids become U.S. citizens.” (On Friday, Ahmed called me to say ICE had offered him postings as a deportation officer in two states. He accepted one in Texas, and is waiting to clear his final background check.) A small group of protesters shouting “Nazi!” and “fascist” outside seemed to do little to deter the prospective new officers. So many people showed up the first day that a voice over the loudspeaker asked anyone who wasn’t a law enforcement officer or veteran to come back again tomorrow. On the second day, ICE had to send people home again. “You’re all still in the hiring process, it doesn’t stop anything,” Matthew Elliston, a senior ICE official, told a crowd of hundreds who hadn’t been called in yet. “Thank you so much for coming. Please look out for your emails.” ICE’S next hiring event will be later this month in Provo, Utah. For more, watch Nicholas’s video from the recruitment fair:
Do you have another question about immigration?The nation’s approach to immigration has been changing fast. We want to hear your questions about these changes — and how they’re affecting you. Our journalists will answer your questions in the On Politics newsletter, as we did today, and we may use them to guide our reporting.
IN HER WORDS A congresswoman opts to freeze her eggs — and talk about itIt’s Jess again. We usually use this space to highlight something said by President Trump, but today, a different quote from Washington caught my eye. “This is the third-oldest Congress in history. We can’t make good policy if my colleagues don’t understand how these things work.” That’s Representative Sara Jacobs, Democrat of California, who told my colleague Annie Karni that her own experience freezing her eggs this summer pushed her to write legislation that would expand military health care coverage of fertility treatments. Jacobs, who at 36 is one of the younger members of Congress, is eager to talk about the experience publicly — even though that entails discussions about unpleasant personal side effects — because she wants her colleagues to understand just what it can take to build a family today. Got a tip? IN ONE GRAPHIC
Late last week, my colleagues reported that settlement talks between Harvard University and the Trump administration appear to have stalled. But when it comes to the deals already made between the Trump administration and the institutions it has attacked — mainly, universities and major law firms — a clear pattern has emerged. Most of the deals involve paying millions of dollars, either in cash or legal services. But the deals also include other concessions, like commitments to redefine discrimination, acquiesce to more government oversight and assess ideology. My colleague Ashley Wu combed through the details, and breaks down what they have in common. It’s a useful guide that might help explain what future deals may contain.
YOU SHOULDN’T MISS How JPMorgan enabled the crimes of Jeffrey EpsteinMore than six years after Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail cell, where he was awaiting prosecution on federal sex-trafficking charges, mysteries continue to swirl around how he amassed and deployed money and influence on a grand scale. That’s been a subject of speculation and conspiracy theories, particularly among those pushing the Trump administration to release the files gathered by federal investigators who examined his case. My colleagues David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg reviewed more than 13,000 pages of documents about Epstein’s finances. They pieced together a sweeping look at the way JPMorgan Chase, the prestigious bank, enabled and enriched Epstein — despite concerns among some of its employees that his withdrawal patterns could be a sign of illicit activity. Read their investigation here. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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