What have GAO and DHS Inspector General reviews found about ICE hiring and training since 2024?

1. GAO’s findings on inspections: high pass rates, recurring deficiencies

The GAO’s 2025 report mapped how four DHS entities conduct detention-facility inspections and found that, from fiscal years 2022 through 2024, nearly all facilities received “passing” ratings even as inspectors repeatedly identified problems—environmental health and safety, food service sanitation, and medical-care shortcomings—demonstrating a disconnect between high aggregate scores and persistent operational deficiencies ^{[1] [2]}.

2. GAO’s core critique: programs lack clear goals and performance measures

Beyond cataloguing specific shortcomings at facilities, GAO’s core recommendation was programmatic: DHS entities lack clearly defined goals and metrics to assess and compare inspection programs, which hampers the ability to use inspection data to identify trends and drive corrective action—a critique that echoes earlier GAO warnings that ICE does not effectively track or analyze self-assessment data ^{[1] [2] [6]}.

3. DHS OIG’s focus: hiring and training under the microscope

Separately, the DHS OIG has launched an active investigation into ICE’s hiring and training surge to determine whether the agency can meet operational needs safely and effectively, a probe public reporting says is monitoring how quickly new staff are being trained and deployed amid unprecedented expansion ^{[3] [7] [8]}.

4. Congressional pressure and the request for a GAO review of hiring practices

House Democrats, led by the Homeland Security Committee, formally requested GAO review of ICE’s “unprecedented” hiring surge, asking whether ICE changed eligibility requirements or expedited processes to hit recruitment targets and noting the rapid expansion as the most significant in agency history—a request GAO officials said they were considering while DHS offered limited public comment ^{[4] [5]}.

5. Concrete hiring changes flagged by oversight and lawmakers

The congressional request details specific staffing-policy shifts that triggered concern, including lowering the minimum age for agents from 21 to 18 and removing an upper age limit as part of measures ICE used to accelerate hiring to meet a goal to add roughly 11,000 officers and agents by the end of 2025—changes that oversight bodies and lawmakers cite as reasons to examine training adequacy and vetting rigor ^[5].

6. The agency’s claim and the oversight gap

ICE and DHS have publicly celebrated a historic manpower increase and said thousands of new officers are deployed nationwide supporting arrests and removals, yet reporting shows DHS OIG inquiries continue and GAO’s work is focused primarily on inspection programs, leaving a gap between the agency’s operational claims and independent, published assessments of whether training and vetting scaled with speed ^{[9] [3] [1]}.

7. Competing interpretations and institutional incentives

Supporters of rapid hiring argue operational necessity and improved enforcement capacity; critics and some oversight entities argue that accelerated recruitment risks lowering standards and that inspection and training systems lack the metrics to prove standards are met—an interpretive divide amplified by political pressures from Congress and by ICE’s public relations emphasis on deployment numbers ^{[5] [4] [9]}.

8. What reporting does not (yet) show

Available public documents and reporting establish GAO’s concerns about inspection metrics and the OIG’s active review of hiring and training, but they do not yet include GAO or OIG final determinations specifically quantifying whether accelerated hiring materially degraded vetting or training outcomes; likewise, GAO had not publicly committed to a new, formal review of the hiring surge at the time congressional requests were made ^{[1] [4] [3]}.