A similar surge last year resulted in undervetted officers initially being let in and then removed as the agency skipped basic checks for new recruits.
Page T3From§Eachthe noon edition — 29 September 2026
Audited for wasting millions on rushed hiring, ICE hires 5,000 more the same way.
As it ran on the front
On September 25, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan office that audits how federal agencies spend, published its accounting of ICE's detention build-out. Six facilities. Billions of dollars committed. Millions of it, the audit found, went to services that were never used, to contracts that were abandoned, to expansions priced well above what comparable space cost elsewhere. CBS News data journalist Julia Ingram walked through the figures the same day: the agency moved fast to expand its detention network, and the fast money left a residue the GAO can now point to and price, line by line.
Four days later, on September 29, the agency answered that ledger. Its answer was 5,000 new hires, the next phase of the deportation drive, per the New York Times. That gap is worth reading against the agency's own file: a similar hiring surge last year let officers through the door before their vetting cleared, then removed them once the vetting caught up. The check that was supposed to run before the badge got issued ran after. ICE has the record of what that shortcut produces. The plan now in front of it is the same shortcut, run again, on a bigger number.…
…(cont) Run the filing against the table and the two documents sit four days apart and rhyme exactly where they shouldn't. One prices what happens when an agency expands its buildings faster than it can account for them. The other announces the agency will expand its workforce the same way it expanded its buildings — fast first, accounting left for whoever reads the next audit. The GAO didn't write the hiring plan. It didn't have to. It already published, on Thursday, what the last version of this plan cost.
None of this requires a motive, hon. It requires a calendar. The audit is dated. The hiring announcement is dated four days later. The undervetted-officer history the Times cites is dated to last year's version of the same surge. Line the three up and the pattern isn't a rush to conclusions — it's an agency that rushes, gets billed for it in writing, and answers the bill with a request for more of the thing that generated it. The 5,000 new hires are not a correction to the audit. They are the audit's sequel, filed in advance, before anyone has read the first one.
“They spent billions building detention space fast, wasted millions doing it, and the fix on the table is hiring five thousand more people the exact same fast way that let unqualified officers walk in the door last time. That's not a policy, that's the same receipt getting reissued at a bigger number. Somebody's neighbor gets picked up by an officer who never finished the background check, and that's what moving fast buys you.”
“Look, an agency serious about removals can't sit around waiting on paperwork — the mission needs bodies now, and if a few officers get through before the check clears, that's staffing, not a scandal. The GAO audit is about facilities, contracts, that kind of thing, it's really a separate matter from hiring people — wait, is that the same rushed process? Did I say separate? Forget I said that.”
Earlier in this story
- Supreme Court threw out the tariffs' emergency statute; the same tariffs go back this week under another law. By Sal · the breakfast edition, 29 September 2026
- Administration fights court to save its mail-ballot rule, kills the women's sports rule without one. By Mort · the sunrise edition, 29 September 2026
The receipts
With an unprecedented budget, ICE spent billions in a rush to expand its detention network, wasting millions in the process, the Government Accountability Office found.
The Trump administration's deadly immigration crackdown has not only resulted in widespread abuse of detained immigrants, it has also wasted millions of dollars on facilities and services that were never used, were quickly abandoned, or were far more expensive than necessary, according to an audit published Thursday by the Government…
· ICE wasted millions in taxpayer dollars in rush to expand detention capacity, watchdog says from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.