The Trump administration is hiring more ICE agents. What training do they receive?

Caption

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent takes part in an early morning operation in Park Ridge, Ill., Friday, Sept. 19, 2025.

Credit: AP Photo/Erin Hooley

Sports fans watching the Major League Baseball playoffs or NFL games may have recently seen commercials advertising jobs with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The ads offer recruits the chance to do something about “dangerous illegals.” These ads, set beside videos of ICE raids in places like Chicago, raise questions about how much training the participants in these raids receive. 

For insight into those questions, we turn now to Scott Sweetow. He's a retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) executive and former special agent in charge of the Atlanta Field Division. He spoke with GPB’s Peter Biello.

Peter Biello: These ads suggest ICE may be looking for people with previous law enforcement experience. So let's start there. If someone has some law enforcement experience, what kind of additional training do you think they're gonna receive to become ICE agents? 

Scott Sweetow: Essentially, the law enforcement personnel that are criminal investigators go through a, quite a lengthy process of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center or FLETC, which is down in Glencoe, Ga., whereas the deportation officers, the ERO personnel go through a much shorter program. So kind of circling back to where this began: if someone is already a criminal investigator with DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, Secret Service, ATF, they've already been through the basic criminal investigator training program, CITP, so they would likely not have to repeat it. They would only have to go through the specialized ICE training, which is also delivered down at FLETC. And, last I recall, it was in the neighborhood of about 12 to 14 weeks. 

Peter Biello: What about people who have no training at all and are motivated by the government's call to action to, as the commercials say, quote, "catch the worst of the worst"? 

Scott Sweetow: Yeah. So if you were not prior law enforcement in a federal capacity, for instance, let's say that you were a banker or a lawyer or a cocktail waitress or anything in between — or really even a local police officer — you would have to go through this basic program, the CITP, the Criminal Investigator Training Program. And CITP right now is about 12 weeks, as I recall. And that's kind of the foundational training for all criminal investigators that are in the federal government, no matter what agency they're working for. They, with the exception of FBI and DEA, everyone goes through that same program. You could be Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General, the Railroad Retirement Board, Department of Labor Inspector General, anything like that. You would have to go through that same program. 

Peter Biello: Is that enough time to train the people that we might be seeing now in videos coming out of places like Illinois, videos that may be disturbing to some people simply because it's capturing moments of intense aggression? 

Scott Sweetow: When you look at the training that's offered, there's really nothing about dealing with riots or civil disturbances or the sort of aggression that's kind of been manifested on TV because that's very atypical for federal law enforcement. So my assumption is they will have to modify that training in the HSI/ICE portion of the academy to kind of cover that. Because you're right: Federal law enforcement is generally not equipped nor are they trained to deal with that. So my expectation would be they'd have to modify the training program because it's a reasonable expectation now, Peter, that that's something that they would be expected to face. 

Peter Biello: I wanted to ask you about the use of face masks. ICE agents seem to be covering their faces so that it's not clear how they could be identified. 

Scott Sweetow: Right. 

Peter Biello: Is that a concern of yours, that ICE agents are wearing masks and could possibly be shielded by anonymity from any claims that they violated someone's constitutional rights? 

Scott Sweetow: My old agency created some — some very specific carve-outs where agents were allowed to cover their faces. But what we're seeing here, Peter, is really kind of a wholesale use where the agents, as kind of a standard operating procedure, are covering their faces. So in talking to retired law enforcement executives, to include people I know from ICE, from HSI — Homeland Security Investigations — the rationale is that the people that are serving those warrants, the ICE officers and federal agents are presumed to be at risk because there's intelligence, that ICE has kind of publicly fronted, that these people are being doxed, that there are personnel groups out there who are actively attempting to identify them for the purposes of targeting them for harassment. But if you're kind of an observer of these sorts of things on TV, and I certainly am, what you notice is that those people are wearing kind of other identifying indicia. 

Peter Biello: So you're saying essentially that, you know, if these people are not visually identifiable — you can't take a picture of them and match it up against a database because their face is covered — in theory, you could use some of their identification on their clothing to, you know, have a civil rights violation accusation, you can file a lawsuit and somewhere in the background the agency will match that number to a name and someone will be held accountable. Is that what you're saying?

Scott Sweetow: Yeah, that's — that's exactly right. It certainly would not be easy because you have people who are kind of similarly attired with the same kinds of uniforms and the indicia that they're wearing or the markings on their uniform may be very subtle or may require some sort of analysis or actually discovery through a legal process where you know, a federal judge would have to compel the agency. "OK, we want, you need to turn over, to the plaintiff and the moving party, you need to, you need to turn over to them information about the operational plan, who was physically present." And then, and make available for interview supervisors who could, like, visually identify because they obviously would know who the personnel were that we're conducting that enforcement operation. But it's kind of a roundabout way of doing it as opposed to the more straightforward way of simply having a face visible. 

Peter Biello: How confident are you that this administration would be forthcoming about the identity of any ICE agent who is accused of violating someone's constitutional rights? 

Scott Sweetow: That's a little tougher, Peter. I guess the only thing I could say is that if you want to predict the future, we kind of look to the past. And I would say that in cases that have popped up along the way, including those dealing with — with ICE, they have complied so far. 

Peter Biello: Well, Scott Sweetow, retired ATF executive and former special agent in charge of the Atlanta Field Division, thank you so much for sharing your insight with us. We appreciate it. 

Scott Sweetow: Thank you, Peter.