ICE gave new hires access to a restricted surveillance app before their fingerprints even cleared.

…(cont) Here is what "before background checks" means on the ground, according to a whistleblower who has worked the agency for seventeen years. Applicants got final job offers before their fingerprints came back, before their identities were confirmed. He filed his complaint with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General in August 2025, and he had a phrase for what happened to hiring standards to get there — an unprecedented lowering, he called it, meaning offers went out ahead of the checks that are supposed to come first. In his own account of the tradeoff ICE made, not the agency's account of itself, he put it plainly: "more convenient rather than thorough." Then he added the sentence that turns a complaint into a filing: the shortcut created, in his words, "grave national security risks."

That's the workforce question sitting open at ICE right now. The next filing in the stack says the agency is drafting a national voter database. Nothing in the record says who's staffing it. What the record does say is that this is the same agency, in the same stretch of months, that left one system's privacy assessment unfiled and left its own hiring pipeline running on offers made before the checks cleared.

A federal court did the opposite arithmetic last year. In March 2025, Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander blocked the Department of Government Efficiency from touching Social Security's data on Americans at all, and ordered the agency to delete whatever it had already pulled. That's what it looks like when a court decides a database of people's identifying information earns a background check before it earns an app. ICE has the app. The privacy assessment is still zero.