Washington Post Review of Hacked DHS Records Finds ICE Hired Officers With Histories of Misconduct

The Washington Post reported Tuesday, Nov. 10, that a review of federal records exposed in a Department of Homeland Security hack found that some Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers quickly hired last year had been involved in past misconduct or criminality. The story, published at 5 a.m. Eastern time under the headline “No business having a gun,” is the latest examination of how ICE staffed up during the Trump administration‘s deportation push.

The Post illustrated the report with a 2025 recruitment flyer, an ICE badge and gun, and 2021 video of a fatal shooting by Detroit police officer JeJuan Jetter, “who was later hired by ICE.” The newspaper’s own presentation is the basis for that identification in this article; The Boston Report has not independently reviewed the leaked personnel files.

What the Post said it found

According to the Post, the records were exposed in a DHS hack and showed that some immigration officers hired quickly last year “were involved in past misconduct or criminality.” The newspaper did not, in the portion of the report available without a subscription early Tuesday, publish a full roster in the open lede, and this article does not treat a complete count as confirmed. What the Post did put on the public page was the core finding, the origin of the records, and the Jetter case as a featured example.

JeJuan Jetter is identified in the Post’s presentation as a former Detroit police officer whose 2021 fatal shooting of a fleeing person was captured on video, and who was later hired by ICE. The Post’s image caption is the public source for that link. Details beyond that caption, including any later legal outcome of the shooting or Jetter’s exact ICE title and hire date, are not repeated here from secondary summaries. Readers should consult the Post’s full report for those particulars.

Because the underlying files came from a hack, the usual cautions apply. A leak can be incomplete, out of date or mixed with material that was never meant to be a finished personnel file. The Post said it reviewed the records; this newspaper has not. Nothing in the public lede, by itself, establishes how common the problems were among last year’s new officers, or how ICE’s background-check process treated each case.

A hiring surge, then a retraining order

The Post’s review lands on an agency that spent the past year hiring at high speed to support a nationwide arrest campaign. NBC News reported on Oct. 2 that more than 10,000 ICE officers whose training was expedited during that surge are now being required to undergo additional training, according to a Department of Homeland Security official, an administration official and a person familiar with the new policy. The point of the original, shortened training, those sources told NBC, was to help the administration raise immigration arrest numbers.

The same NBC report said the agency was still making near record-setting immigration arrests each month, including more than 48,000 arrests in September. Those figures predate Tuesday’s Post story and do not, on their own, prove or disprove the newspaper’s findings about individual officers’ pasts. They do show why the quality of last year’s hiring is now a live political issue: a large share of the force now making arrests was trained on a compressed timeline, and the department has already decided that thousands of those officers need more instruction.

President Donald Trump said in a recent interview that some deportations had been “too tough,” even as U.S. officials said the ICE arrest push would continue. The tension between a record pace of arrests and questions about who was hired to carry them out is the backdrop for the Post’s review.

Earlier warnings, and what is still unknown

Tuesday’s story is not the first time the hiring push has been scrutinized. In an investigation published April 17, the Associated Press, in a report carried by The Seattle Times, said ICE had set out to hire 12,000 new officers and special agents to double its force after receiving a $75 billion appropriation from Congress. AP reviewed public records for more than 40 people who had posted their new ICE jobs on LinkedIn. Several had histories of unpaid debts that led to legal action, two had filed for bankruptcy, and one example cited by AP involved an allegation of lying in a police report that led to a $75,000 settlement. The news organization said it did not have access to full personnel files and could not say how many of those officers should have been disqualified.

ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told a congressional hearing in February that he was proud of a campaign that had drawn more than 220,000 applications and that “this expansion of a well-trained and well-vetted workforce will help further ICE’s ability to execute the president’s and secretary’s bold agenda,” AP reported. The Department of Homeland Security did not answer AP’s questions about specific hiring decisions, the April report said, but it acknowledged that some applicants received “tentative selection letters” and offers to begin working on a temporary status before they had been subjected to full background checks. Claire Trickler-McNulty, who served as an ICE official in the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations, told AP that if vetting is done too quickly, “you have higher risk of increased liability to the agency because of bad actions, abuse of power and the lack of ability to properly carry out the mission.” Those findings are separate from the Post’s hacked-records review and should not be collapsed into a single investigation.

In Greater Boston, Chelsea Public Schools added staff at dismissal last week after reports of ICE agents near campuses, one local measure of how visible the enforcement surge has become. National politics will now test how the administration answers the Post’s specific findings: whether the officers flagged in the leaked records are still on the job, whether their cases were fully vetted, and whether the retraining announced in October addresses the problems the newspaper described.

As of early Tuesday, The Boston Report had not obtained a fresh on-the-record response from ICE or DHS to the Post’s latest article. Until those agencies address the named example and the broader review, the public record is the Post’s account of hacked files, the Jetter identification in its presentation, and the earlier, separately sourced reports on expedited training and record arrest totals.

Sources

• The Washington Post: “No business having a gun”: Some ICE recruits had a record of red flags
• NBC News: More than 10,000 ICE officers to receive additional training
• Associated Press, via The Seattle Times, April 17, 2026: ICE went on a hiring spree. Sterling credentials were not required