As the Trump administration pushes for expanded immigration enforcement, a new review by The Associated Press is highlighting misconduct allegations involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and contractors. The AP said at least two dozen ICE employees and contractors have been charged with crimes since 2020, and that the cases include patterns of physical and sexual abuse as well as other misuses of authority.
The AP’s review also tied the misconduct allegations to the pace of ICE’s recent growth. Congress voted last year to give ICE $75 billion to hire more agents and detain more people, and while most of the criminal cases the AP identified occurred before that funding decision, experts said crimes like those documented in court and charging records could rise as ICE’s workforce expands and new officers take on enforcement roles.
In its discussion of risk factors, the AP said almost every law enforcement agency faces problems from bad employees, but that ICE’s rapid growth and mission to deport large numbers make it especially prone to abuse. The review said the immense power ICE officers exercise over vulnerable populations can create opportunities for misconduct, particularly when officers conduct enforcement operations while facing protests and with detainee populations growing.
ICE has argued that allegations of wrongdoing are taken seriously. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the agency’s wrongdoing was not widespread, and that ICE “takes allegations of misconduct by its employees extremely seriously,” according to the AP review. She also said most new hires have come from other law enforcement agencies and that their backgrounds were “thoroughly vetted,” and she added, “America can be proud of the professionalism our officers bring to the job day-in and day-out.”
The AP review pointed to how ICE’s expansion could change the misconduct picture. It said ICE announced that it doubled in size in less than one year to 22,000 employees after a fast hiring spree, and it compared that trajectory to the Border Patrol’s experience when that agency doubled its ranks over a 7-year period ending in 2011. The AP said that earlier expansion left the Border Patrol “embarrassed” by waves of corruption, abuse and other misconduct by some newly hired employees.
Former U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske, as quoted by the AP, said ICE is likely to see even more serious problems. He also told the AP that ICE agents are particularly vulnerable to “unnecessary use of force issues,” given that they conduct enforcement operations while protests are ongoing, and he said the rapid increase in people held in ICE detention means there are more opportunities for misconduct by personnel responsible for overseeing detainees.
The AP said arrests involving ICE personnel have posed recent headaches for the agency. The review said at least nine such arrests across the country occurred over the last year, including an assistant ICE field office supervisor in Cincinnati who had been jailed since December after a judge found him a danger to the public and said he had violently assaulted his girlfriend for years.
The AP also described sexual misconduct charges involving ICE employees and contractors in Minnesota. It said two ICE employees faced federal sexual misconduct charges related to underage girls, including an employment eligibility auditor arrested in a sting operation in November, and it said the auditor has pleaded not guilty. The AP further said an ICE investigator in the state pleaded guilty to sending images and videos of himself having sex with a 17-year-old girl, and it said the investigator had searched for her background in a law enforcement database.
Beyond charges tied directly to detention conditions, the AP said some cases involved conduct outside of the workplace that still connected to ICE work. The AP said two ICE agents faced charges for incidents outside Chicago while they were off-duty but involved their agency work: one was charged last month with assaulting a protester filming him at a gas station, and the other was cited for driving drunk shortly after leaving work at a detention center with his government firearm in the vehicle.
The review also highlighted criminal cases involving violence and sexual abuse within ICE facilities. The AP said a former top official at an ICE contract facility in Texas was sentenced to probation on Feb. 4 after acknowledging he grabbed a handcuffed detainee by the neck and slammed him into a wall last year, and it said prosecutors downgraded the charge from a felony to a misdemeanor. It said that in December an ICE contractor pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a detainee at a detention facility in Louisiana, and that prosecutors described sexual encounters with a Nicaraguan national over a five-month period in 2025 while the contractor instructed other detainees to act as lookouts.
The AP said other similarities involved corruption cases tied to financial gain. It reported that a deportation officer in Houston was indicted last year on charges that he repeatedly accepted cash bribes from bail bondsmen in exchange for removing detainers ICE had placed on clients targeting them for deportation, and it said the officer pleaded not guilty to seven counts of accepting bribes and was released from custody while awaiting trial. The AP also said two Utah-based ICE investigators were sentenced to prison last year for a scheme in which they made hundreds of thousands of dollars stealing synthetic drugs known as “bath salts” from government custody and selling them for profit through government informants.