President Trump proposed a budget Thursday that would hire a tenth of the immigration enforcement personnel he called for in a January executive order.
Trump signed orders calling for the hiring of 10,000 additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers and 5,000 Border Patrol agents; Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly then signed memos implementing this hiring surge. The hiring of additional border patrol agents and ICE officers was a major component of Trump’s immigration plan during his campaign.
The new budget falls well short of those figures.
A press release by the Department of Homeland Security highlighting funding from the budget blueprint for Fiscal Year 2018 said it funds the “hiring of 500 new Border Patrol agents and 1,000 new ICE law enforcement personnel.”
“You can’t hire them all at once,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Caller.
A Customs and Border Protection memo states that the CBP workforce needs to increase by 6,743 in the next five years, and that in order to account for a loss of approximately 1,380 losses per year, it must hire around 2,729 Border Patrol agents to achieve full staffing in five years.
There has been no public ICE memo about how it plans to implement the hiring surge called for by Trump and Kelly.
A DHS spokesman told TheDC, “because these agencies need time to significantly ramp up their recruiting pipeline and absorb this surge in new employees, the Budget makes a down payment on this commitment, proposing funding for the first 10 percent of these new hires: 500 Border Patrol Agents and 1,000 new ICE officers and agents in addition to support personnel.”