Staff members at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong-arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found as recently as this month that some recruits going through the six-week training course hadn’t submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said. (snip)

“There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” the current DHS official said. The official said many of the issues that have been flagged during training surface only because the recruits admitted they didn’t submit to fingerprinting or drug testing before they arrived.

“What about the ones who don’t admit it?” the official said.

The Department of Homeland Security told NBC News in a statement that most of its new recruits are former law enforcement officers and former ICE officers who go through a different process. (snip)

As part of the effort, ICE shortened the training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia from 13 weeks to eight. The training was later shortened to six weeks, the DHS official said.
Recruits also are supposed to attest that they can pass ICE’s physical fitness test, which includes situps, pullups and running 1½ miles in under 14 minutes, 25 seconds.

Nearly half of new recruits who’ve arrived for training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center over the past three months were later sent home because they couldn’t pass the written exam, according to the data. The academic requirement includes an exam in which officers are allowed to consult their textbooks and notes at the end of a legal course on the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Fourth Amendment, which outlines when officers can and can’t conduct searches and seizures.

More than a third have failed so far, four officials told me, impeding the agency’s plan to hire, train, and deploy 10,000 deportation officers by January. To pass, recruits must do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.

“It’s pathetic,” one career ICE official told me, adding that before now, a typical class of 40 recruits had only a couple of candidates fail, because the screening process was more rigorous.