DHS- ICE: The Making of a Paramilitary Force Plain Sight

The Steady State | by Ken Syring

DHS/ICE: Inside the System Producing Volatile, Unaccountable Federal Agents

Photo by Jim Vondruska/REUTERS/PBS

If you wanted to design a hiring and training system that would produce the most psychologically volatile, constitutionally illiterate federal law enforcement officers possible, it would look almost exactly like what the Department of Homeland Security is building today

When I was a cop in San Francisco, I learned something about my profession that most people outside of it never think about: the same instincts that can make someone good at the job can also make them dangerous. Traits that, in measured amounts, can help you survive a night shift in a rough neighborhood. They can help you make split-second decisions under pressure. They’re part of why many people become officers in the first place.

But those same traits, when left unchecked, when fed the wrong information, when exploited by the wrong people, can turn a protector into something else entirely.

I’ve spent years studying this. First, as a police officer; then, as a researcher at Georgetown focused on extremism and disinformation; and, most recently, as Deputy Chief of Staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Social psychologists have identified two measurable traits that can indicate whether someone is more likely to support authoritarian politics, believe conspiracy theories, use excessive force, or be recruited into extremist movements. They’re called Right-Wing Authoritarianism (a psychological orientation toward deference to authority and rigid order that, despite its name, has been documented across the political spectrum – including in left-wing Stalinist and Maoist movements), and Social Dominance Orientation (the belief that some groups of people just naturally belong above others).

These aren’t rare traits: everyone carries some degree of both. But research finds that law enforcement populations carry more. Not because cops are “bad” people – many of the finest people I’ve ever known have served or still serve in state, local, and federal law enforcement – but because the profession itself attracts and rewards exactly these psychological profiles. And that creates a specific vulnerability from authoritarian state capture that most of us have never thought about.

ICE Recruitment

DHS has committed $100 million to what internal documents call a “wartime recruitment” campaign. They’re geo-targeting ads at people who attend UFC fights, frequent gun shows, and listen to what the strategy describes as “patriotic podcasts.” The recruitment ads themselves tell the story. One used the phrase “Which Way, American Man?” — markedly similar to the title of a book published by a neo-Nazi author. Another used the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” popularized in neo-Nazi subcultures and sung by Proud Boys at rallies. Others featured Manifest Destiny imagery with captions in which the words “Heritage” and “Homeland” were capitalized, and containing fourteen words. In white supremacist and neo-Nazi subculture, the number 1488 is a well-known signal (14 being the white supremacist ‘fourteen words’ creed, and 88 meaning H.H. – the 8th letter of the alphabet – for “Heil Hitler”).

These ads aren’t recruiting public servants. They’re recruiting for an ideological force projection, and the people they’re designed to attract are precisely those most likely to carry the elevated authoritarian and dominance traits that make officers dangerous rather than effective.

The Vetting

Now look at the inadequate vetting. Journalist Laura Jedeed, who has publicly criticized ICE, attended a DHS job fair in Texas. After a six-minute interview, she was offered a position as a deportation officer. No paperwork completed. No background check. She likely failed her drug screen. DHS tried to deny it; Jedeed had the receipts; final offer letters, and an onboarding status showing her as “Entered On Duty.” Earlier reports revealed recruits arriving at the federal training academy in Georgia who had failed drug tests, had disqualifying criminal records, or didn’t meet basic fitness or academic standards discovered only after they were already there. Former Acting ICE Director John Sandweg said it plainly: “We’ve lowered our standards.”

The Training

And then there’s the training, or what’s left of it. Ryan Schwank, an ICE academy lawyer, resigned in February 2026 and testified before Congress that the training program for new officers is “deficient, defective, and broken.” Internal documents he turned over show that training has been cut from 72 days to 42, with nearly 250 fewer hours of instruction. Courses on the use of force, firearms safety, and the U.S. Constitution have been, apparently, removed entirely. A two-hour lesson on the constitutional rights of protesters was compressed to roughly ten minutes. And on his first day at the academy, Schwank testified, he was instructed to read a secret memo in his supervisor’s presence claiming ICE officers could enter homes without a judicial warrant: something DHS’s own 2025 legal training materials had called “the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”

This isn’t a staffing problem being handled sloppily; it’s a pipeline engineered to produce officers who are ideologically primed, constitutionally untrained, and operationally unaccountable. And the research predicts exactly what that pipeline will produce: escalation, profiling, excessive force, and service to an ideology and leader rather than the Constitution. It will lead to the destruction of the community trust that constitutional law enforcement depends on.

Not An Accident

The construction of a personal paramilitary force, recruited from ideologically primed groups, stripped of constitutional training, and answerable to a leader rather than a legal order, is among the most reliable early indicators of autocratic consolidation. Restructuring a legitimate law enforcement entity into a form of ideological force projection is an objective any aspiring American autocrat would need to accomplish, and it is among the last things a functioning democracy can afford to let happen quietly.

And now, we’re watching those predictions come true in real time.

Ken Syring served as Deputy Chief of Staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection and is a former San Francisco police officer and forensic investigator. He is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Mongolia, 2006–2008). His research on mitigating authoritarian traits through national service has been published in the National Civic Review, and his work on countering extremism in law enforcement presented at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.