Unsupervised ICE: Built for Violence as Hiring Surge Overwhelms Supervision

[ericjhensal]

I want to flag a new data-driven analysis because it puts hard numbers behind what is now visible across the country in the outcomes of ICE enforcement.

Over 2025, ICE rapidly hired thousands of new agents. In the process, three basic law-enforcement principles—standard safeguards meant to prevent abuse—were willfully set aside during the hiring surge.

• New agent hires overwhelmingly lacked the promised prior law-enforcement experience and overall recruiting standards were lowered below customary norms.

• The training academy largely stopped filtering out recruits who should not be in the field.

• First-line supervision was allowed to collapse, as documented in today’s article.

Using public OPM workforce data, I tracked ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations month by month through 2025. In just nine months, the ratio of agents to first-line supervisors jumped from about 6 in February to more than 11 by November. At the same time, the share of agents with less than one year on the job exploded from under 3% to more than 25%. Project numbers forward to December 2025, and you are looking at roughly a 12-to-1 ratio with about one-third rookie agents.

That means fewer experienced supervisors trying to manage far more inexperienced agents—exactly the conditions that lead to abuse and loss of control.

This piece is Part 3 of a series, but it stands on its own and includes all the data, tables, and sources.

Here is the full write-up:
https://newsletter.aprogressiveway.com/unsupervised-ice-built-for-violence/

Curious what others here think about the supervision numbers, and how they connect to the hiring and academy failures in Parts 1 and 2. I know charts and ratios do not help people already suffering at the hands of ICE, but my hope is that this work helps opponents fight more effectively—politically and historically—against what has happened under Trump.

[patphil]

1. It was evident from the bystander videos that ICE is out of control.

They're just trying to build the numbers, without any concern for professional behavior. One might think their purpose goes way beyond immigration control.
Even a drug cartel has better organization, supervision, and control over it's people than DHS has.
The blood in the streets is the blood of the innocents. I fear there'll be a lot more before this is over.

[justaprogressive]

2. Clear confirmation of observable behavior