EXCLUSIVE — Over 250,000 Americans have applied to become federal law enforcement with the Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Washington Examiner has learned.
The U.S. Border Patrol has received over 100,000 applications during President Donald Trump’s second term, Chief Mike Banks shared during an interview with the Washington Examiner this week.
ICE has received 175,000 applications throughout an ad blitz that the DHS launched earlier this summer. It will hire 10,000 applicants.
Although fewer people have applied to Border Patrol, its recruitment haul is a bigger success given that all of the attention — and massive sign-up bonuses — are being offered by ICE. Despite the big incentives at ICE, Border Patrol has a huge appeal.
“Our recruitment numbers are actually through the roof, and I attribute a big part of that to the support we’re getting from this administration,” Banks said. “We’ve had over 100,000 applicants. We averaged, we’re averaging about 12,000 applicants a month.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Congress earlier this summer, funded the addition of 3,000 Border Patrol agents. However, with retirements and other forms of attrition, the agency’s workforce currently stands at around 20,000 employees, with funding for 25,000 total.
Border Patrol agents work between land ports of entry and select coastal regions to keep people and goods from coming into the country without inspection.
“Every seat at our academy has a trainee in that academy getting ready to be trained up, or are being trained up to go out to the field,” Banks said. “We’re already filling seats as far into the next year. We pushed out over 1,000 new Border Patrol agents to the field since January, and our goal for next year is well over 3,000. We don’t have a shortage of applicants.”
Border Patrol lost about a quarter of its workforce in the three and a half years following former President Joe Biden’s arrival in office, as demoralized agents opted to retire early, find new jobs, or quit.
On top of that, Border Patrol anticipates a sharp uptick in retirements among employees who joined in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
A report published by the Government Accountability Office in Washington concluded that beginning in late 2026, “significant increases” in retirements in U.S. Customs and Border Protection law enforcement positions “could have significant effects” on the agency’s ability to meet its national security mission.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans included a funding solution to give CBP a hefty investment to hire more staff and retain existing employees.
“One of the things that we’re looking at now is instead of using that money as a recruitment incentive, we’re moving it into the retention incentive programs,” Banks said. “If you sign a two-year agreement to stay on for at least two more years before you’d retire, or before you would decide to leave … you receive that bonus.… We feel very confident that our retention bonuses are going to be equivalent to what ICE is offering.”
To attract more recruits, ICE lifted age restrictions on new hires. Previously, applicants were limited to a minimum age of 21 and could be no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position. As a result, Dean Cain, the Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman actor, announced in a video that he had joined the federal agency at age 59.
The ICE website implores U.S. citizens to join the agency and help the Trump administration‘s mass deportation efforts to arrest, detain, and remove illegal immigrants from the interior of the country.
New hires are eligible for a one-time bonus of up to $50,000, up to $60,000 in student loan repayment, and other incentives related to time off, retirement, and overtime.
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Banks said the type of person who joins Border Patrol is different from the type who joins ICE.
“The type of people the Border Patrol recruits are people that want to be outdoors,” Banks said. “So we’re also targeting our recruiting toward those type of people and so, and they’re also, these people don’t mind living on the southwest border and a lot of these remote locations. And so, believe it or not, there’s a lot of Americans who really enjoy living out in those remote locations.”
