ICE looks to private sector to help hire nearly 6,600 workers to support the 10,000 new agents Trump wants

• President Donald Trump’s goal of hiring more ICE agents also means the agency has to hire thousands of additional support personnel — and it’s looking to the private sector for help.
• ICE said it need to hire 6,597 “support personnel positions” in order to handle the 10,000 new agents.
• The agency said it will contract with the private sector to help recruit, process and hire the 6,597 positions. So far, costs for the contract aren’t known, since no official contract solicitation has been issued.

A little more than year ago President Donald Trump signed an executive order that spelled out his administration’s initial steps to crack down on unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. — chief among them a mandate to hire an additional 10,000 new agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE has yet to hire the new agents. The agency said this week it has built a “pipeline” of candidates it can begin putting through the hiring process but has to wait for Congress to appropriate money to do so.

Meanwhile, ICE is moving ahead on another front, looking to the private sector to help it add thousands of additional jobs — jobs they say are needed to support the influx of 10,000 new agents.

This week ICE issued a notice that it plans to seek bids for a three-year contract to help the agency hire 6,597 “support personnel positions.” These jobs are in addition to the 10,000 that Trump ordered — effectively boosting the total new hires to the agency to more than 16,000 in the coming years.

ICE currently has a workforce of 20,000 — including agents, officers, investigators and non law-enforcement support positions.

The contract for “Comprehensive Hiring and Recruitment Services” has not yet been put out to bid, so what this will cost ICE is not yet known. But there is solid interest in helping the agency out: As of Wednesday, 17 companies signaled interest in bidding on the contract when the time comes.

The decision by ICE to reach out to the private sector to help with hiring goals mandated by the Trump administration echoes a similar move that Customs and Border Protection took in November — one that has now drawn scrutiny from the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Trump wants CBP to hire an additional 5,000 Border Patrol agents, a mandate made in a different executive order issued around the same time as the one calling for 10,000 ICE agents. In order to do that, CBP inked a contract with the consulting firm Accenture for up to $297 million over five years to help them hire the Border Patrol agents, as well as 2,000 customs officer and 500 agents for its Air and Marine Operations.

That works out to a bit more than $39,000 per hire — just below the entry level salary for a customs officer. The agency said it needed help from the private sector to recruit candidates and process them through hiring because of its long-running hiring woes that have seen it lose more agents that it hires in a year. The agency has to work through 133 applicants to hire a single agent.

ICE gives a similar rationale. In a 19-page statement of objectives for the recruitment assistance contract, the agency said the surge in hiring will overwhelm its internal personnel office, called the Office of Human Capital. That office “does not have the capacity to execute at the pace and scope of the hiring activities required to meet this target with its current federal human resources workforce. “

Last February, then-Secretary John Kelly of Homeland Security spelled out how the objectives in Trump’s order would be met. The memo said ICE would not only expeditiously hire the 10,000 agents, but also “additional operational and mission support and legal staff necessary to hire and support their activities.”

The contractor who gets the job will be charged with recruitment, market research, data analytics, marketing, hiring, and getting new hires working at the agency. The government said it will pay based on results and not simply completing tasks — a pay-for-performance model.

A spokeswoman for the agency said in an email this week that the agency has been preparing for the huge increase in employees. It has been granted permission to hire retired workers who can be paid without offsetting reduction in their pension, and the authority to directly hire people without going through the federal Office of Personnel Management.

In addition the spokeswoman wrote that ICE “has made improvements to our hiring processes in order to meet the anticipated unprecedented hiring numbers in the coming years.”

The pending contract is the latest example of the ripple effects from Trump’s call to boost border security and immigration enforcement, and the challenges facing the law enforcement agencies in making those goals.

The $297 million Accenture contract caught the attention of Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security committee. On Jan. 3 she wrote to Acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan demanding answers to several questions about the deal, including why CBP needed help from a contractor to hire new agents in the first place. She also requested a briefing on the deal.

The documents posted this week for the pending ICE contract did not give a timeline for when the contract would be approved.

Twitter: @gregmoran

greg.moran@sduniontribune.com