ICE recruits brought in to staff the president’s frenzied deportation drive include a man who lasted just three weeks as a police officer, another with two bankruptcies behind him, and a third accused of lying to bring charges against an innocent woman.
The agency hired those officials, along with 12,000 others, using $75 billion approved by Congress last year to fund President Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown, according to an Associated Press investigation published Friday.
Scrutiny continues to mount over the vetting process for new recruits, given the frenzied pace at which ICE has expanded its workforce to meet White House demands and amid repeated allegations of excessive force leveled against Homeland Security officials—including the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, both American citizens, in Minnesota in January.
“If you’re hiring hundreds or thousands of people, even with the best of background processes, there are going to be outliers,” Marshall Jones, a Florida Institute of Technology expert on police recruitment, told the outlet. “The question is, are these normal outliers from human beings doing things, or is there a systemic challenge in properly vetting folks if there are issues?”
Todd Lyons, who oversaw the recruitment drive as acting director of ICE, told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing in February that the hiring spree had produced “a well-trained and well-vetted workforce” that would “help further ICE’s ability to execute the president’s and secretary’s bold agenda.”
DHS announced Thursday, the day before AP published its latest investigation, that Lyons will be stepping down at the end of May after almost two decades at the agency. The department has not yet announced his replacement.
The AP report identified Antonio Barrett, who in 2020 failed to graduate from a law enforcement academy in Colorado, as one of the new ICE hires. Barrett reportedly only went on to pass with “an incomplete grade” after attending “a special one-day training and test” arranged for him by a community college.
He eventually secured a job at a local police force in the state, but quit after three weeks. He is not thought to have worked in a local law enforcement capacity since, instead taking a job as a corrections officer at a Colorado prison. Here, he was accused of using excessive force by forcibly removing a man from a wheelchair. He joined ICE last year.
Another is Carmine Gurcilacci, whom the agency hired in December after he quit his job as a police officer in Atlanta, Georgia. This followed a three-year period in which he hopped between no fewer than six law enforcement agencies.
Gurcilacci has also twice filed for bankruptcy, in both New York and Georgia, on one occasion telling the court he was unemployed, living rent-free with a friend in exchange for doing chores, and had racked up massive debts in the form of child support, unpaid loans and bills.
Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official under both the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as the first Trump administration, told AP that financial difficulties of this scale are ordinarily “a pretty big flag,” because they can make staff more vulnerable to corruption and extortion.
A third recent ICE hire identified by the outlet is Andrew Penland, who previously worked as a sheriff’s deputy in Kansas. He left that job to join the agency last year after a lawsuit accused him of making an arrest in 2022 over allegations that turned out to be false.
June Bench, the woman Penland arrested, told AP that a neighbor, with whom she claims to have had a personal dispute, had accused her of nearly hitting him with her car.
Penland, who urged the neighbor to press charges, apparently wrote in a report on the incident that he had seen surveillance footage of the neighbor jumping out of the path of the vehicle. Bench, who eventually defeated the charges, obtained a copy of that footage, which apparently shows no such near-collision took place.
“That’s scary to me,” Bench said upon learning of Penland’s new role as a federal immigration agent. “He abuses his power.”
Last month, Trump fired Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary whom Lyons was referring to in his comments to Congress, following a slew of scandals that included the two fatal shootings in Minneapolis, the more than $220 million Noem spent on self-serving advertising, and an alleged extramarital affair with her adviser, Corey Lewandowski.
Her replacement, former Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, has said one of his principal goals as the department’s new head is to ensure “we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
The Daily Beast contacted DHS for comment on this story. The department did not address the AP’s findings, instead only praising Lyons’ time in office.
“Director Lyons has been a great leader of ICE and key player in helping the Trump administration remove murderers, rapists, pedophiles, terrorists, and gang members from American communities,” Secretary Mullin said. “He jump-started an agency that had not been allowed to do its job for four years. Thanks to his leadership, American communities are safer.”
DHS further forwarded the Beast’s request to the White House, which also did not address the outlet’s investigation, but provided comments backing Lyons from both Border Czar Tom Homan and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, widely reported to be the architect of the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration crackdown.
“I commend him for a distinguished law enforcement career and the countless contributions he has made to protect our country and advance its interests,” Homan said.
“Todd is a phenomenal patriot and dedicated leader who has been at the center of President Trump’s historic efforts to secure our homeland and reverse the Democrats’ sinister border invasion,” Miller added.
