The Deportation Academy
Trump halts all other federal law enforcement training so 10,000 new deportation cops can cut the line.
WASHINGTON — The word came down in a memo that might as well have been written in spray paint across the walls of every federal law enforcement office in the country: Stop. ICE goes first.
At the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Georgia, the classrooms will stay dark. The gun ranges will stay quiet. The instructors will stand around drinking burnt coffee because their students—the National Park rangers, the military police, the inspectors general, the TSA recruits—have been told to come back in 2026. Uncle Sam doesn’t have the time or the space for them.
Why? Because Donald Trump got his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” through Congress and it dropped a mountain of cash into the lap of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ten thousand new deportation cops, plus another thousand for Homeland Security Investigations. The president’s pet project has to be trained yesterday, so the rest of the federal government is told to wait their turn.
MIGRANT INSIDER is sponsored by
The ICE Superiority Complex
This is more than a scheduling problem. It’s a declaration of hierarchy. The administration just told every other badge in the country—from the ones guarding Yellowstone to the ones investigating fraud in the Pentagon—that their mission is second-class compared to ICE. The message is loud: ICE is America’s real police.
That’s insane. Ask any cop worth his badge what happens when you stop training. Skills get rusty. New recruits sit idle. Agencies start filling rosters with underprepared rookies. First responders lose their edge. In a country where one hurricane, one mass shooting, one terrorist attack is always lurking around the corner, readiness isn’t optional. It’s oxygen.
But the White House just cut the oxygen line for every federal agency that isn’t ICE.
MIGRANT INSIDER is sponsored by
The Short-Term Hustle
Inside FLETC, even the employees know this is a bad deal. One of them told GovExec reporter Eric Katz that the place isn’t “prioritizing the building of long-term capabilities.” They’re scrambling for quick fixes—temporary classrooms, shuffled schedules, training squeezed into smaller windows. ICE, meanwhile, has chopped its own six-month training course down to 48 days. That’s less a training program than a crash diet.
So here’s the picture: A flood of green recruits, lured with $50,000 bonuses and no age caps, rushed through boot camp like cattle in a chute. Out the other side, they’re handed guns, badges, and the authority to decide who stays in America and who gets put on a plane out.
MY TAKE: This country runs on the guys fixing busted generators in national parks, the women pulling shifts at airport checkpoints, the inspectors chasing fraud and waste in billion-dollar contracts. All of them need training. All of them need to be sharp. And all of them just got told to stand down because ICE has dibs.
You don’t need to love or hate immigrants to see the insanity. Every federal badge is supposed to mean something. But now one badge—ICE’s—means everything, while the rest are told they’re background noise.
And when the next disaster hits, when a park cop, or a prison guard, or a TSA screener freezes because he missed the training class that got pushed into next year, we’ll remember who made that choice. It wasn’t the cop. It wasn’t the screener. It was the man who thinks deportations are the only job in America that matters.
If you’ve made it this far, you care. Help me keep pressing the powerful for answers and exposing what they’d rather you never see—subscribe or donate to keep Migrant Insider going.