The Department of Homeland Security is buckling under more than 10,000 equal employment opportunity claims tied to former Secretary Kristi Noem’s chaotic ICE hiring blitz, according to a new investigation by PunchUp.
The figure was uncovered by a 68-year-old retired police officer from Ohio who applied to become a deportation officer around the time Noem, 54, theatrically scrapped the upper age limit for ICE recruits last summer. Months later, he was told, after completing training, that he was “too old” for the job.
The man—identified only by his first name, Doug—told PunchUp, the Beast’s new sister outlet, that two DHS officials informed him the agency was wrestling with about 10,000 such claims. They did not specify how many related to age discrimination, PunchUp reports.
In an August PR push featuring 59-year-old former Superman actor Dean Cain, DHS announced it was “ENDING the age cap for ICE enforcement,” promising “qualified candidates” could apply with “no age limit.” Until that point, the mandatory retirement age for agents had been 60.
Doug, who said he served 23 “exemplary” years in law enforcement before retiring in 2019, applied on July 30 last year—three weeks before Noem’s announcement—anticipating the change. Six days later, he said he was “thrilled” to receive a tentative offer for a desk-based role in Atlanta, with a $127,000 base salary and a $20,000 annual bonus. With overtime and his existing pension, he calculated he could comfortably clear $250,000 a year.
What followed was a masterclass in dysfunction.
His posting was shunted to Indianapolis, then back to Atlanta the day before he was due to start, giving him no time to make the 11-hour drive. ICE eventually pushed his start date to Oct. 20, he said.
By then, he had been sworn in and assigned a virtual course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, working four or five hours a day for weeks and plowing through a 400-page training manual he describes as “critical-sensitive.”
“In the wrong hands,” he told PunchUp, “it could be used nefariously.”
Just after midnight on Oct. 20, ICE pushed him back another week because it said there were too many recruits to process. Four days later, a one-paragraph email pulled the rug entirely: “It has been determined that you do not meet the eligibility for [the] age requirement for the position; therefore, the offer of employment is rescinded.”
There was no compensation for the hours he had sunk into training and paperwork. “I feel a lot of resentment, because in good faith, I did all of this for nothing,” Doug told PunchUp.
He filed EEO complaints against ICE and DHS on Nov. 4, seeking the job or back pay and bonuses totaling more than $40,000. After weeks of silence, an EEO officer finally called on Dec. 4.
According to Doug, she sounded “exasperated,” said the agency was buried in thousands of similar cases, and told him that Noem had never actually possessed the power to scrap the age cap—it was an HR issue. Doug said another HR official told him the cap had never been lifted.
PunchUp asked DHS four times whether the age limit had been waived, as the agency publicly claimed, and to confirm the volume of EEO cases stemming from the recruitment drive. It did not respond.
PunchUp also reported last week that ICE was re-vetting its new recruits to weed out “bad actors” following a series of jaw-dropping security failures.
Noem—who garnered her ICE Barbie nickname for spending her tenure cosplaying as her agents in tactical gear before being fired by President Donald Trump in March and replaced by former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, 48—has yet to address the fallout.
Doug’s case, now in months-long mediation with no resolution in sight, echoes this reporter’s earlier Beast reporting on Noem’s “disastrous” hiring efforts. “This is more than a s--tshow,” he told PunchUp. “It’s worse than that.”
He worries the system is locking out the recruits ICE needs most. “The best candidates are the ones with experience,” he said. “That’s your old guys, like me, but they aren’t allowed to hire me.”
