Prepare Yourself for the 18-Year-Old Vigilante ICE Agent

DEAN CAIN, WHO PLAYED SUPERMAN in the 1990s TV show Lois & Clark, announced last week that he was joining ICE. You’d be excused for missing the announcement. After all, it’s Dean Cain.

But here he was on Fox News, explaining his decision by noting that he is already a sworn deputy sheriff and a reserve police officer.

“This country was built on patriots stepping up, whether it was popular or not, and doing the right thing,” Cain said. “I truly believe this is the right thing.”

Will Cain be rounding up workers, taxpayers, or churchgoers who have been here decades? No. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the New York Times that the actor will be merely “an honorary ICE Officer.” He will help ICE further its massive new recruiting push, one that is already swelling its ranks.

That a man who once portrayed a superhero who was literally an alien (and who stayed hidden on quintessentially American farmland) is now devoting himself to going after the undocumented, has provided no shortage of fodder for comedians and commentators. TV host Van Lathan chuckled, “It’s not 1995. No one gives a sad hell what Dean Cain thinks.” Referring to the signing bonus ICE is offering new recruits, Lathan added, “Dean needs the $50,000—that’s what got him off the couch.”

John Oliver quipped that it was probably a bad sign that ICE has been “reduced to pinning a badge on the 59-year-old star of The Dog Who Saved Christmas, The Dog Who Saved Christmas Vacation, The Dog Who Saved the Holidays, The Dog Who Saved Halloween, The Dog Who Saved Easter, and The Dog Who Saved Summer.”

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But Cain’s ICE enlistment really isn’t a laughing matter. Rather it is the most high-profile illustration of the lowering of agency standards that is setting off alarms in immigrant rights and civil rights communities.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced an end to age restrictions for employment at ICE. “Qualified candidates can now apply with no age limit,” she said. Before the change, applicants to ICE had to be at least 21 years old, and no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position they were applying for, according to the Associated Press. They can now be as young as 18 or as old as Methuselah.

In making this change, Noem invited the possibility of allowing into the ranks people not just of Cain’s relatively advanced age—at 59, he’s two decades outside the former upper age limit for applicants—but also gun-toting, masked teenagers with minimal training and experience. The possibility of these people swarming restaurants, shops, factories, churches, and homes looking for immigrants, all with the imprimatur—not to mention the qualified immunity—of federal law enforcement, has never been so real.

Regular readers of this newsletter might remember the July 25 issue about how ICE’s rush to hire 10,000 people as quickly as possible would inevitably result in relaxed standards and poorer training. Removing the lower age restriction—which serves as a proxy not just for work experience but for experience in the world generally, not to mention development of the frontal cortex and emotional maturation—only invites further problems and abuses.

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Noem’s remarks understandably spooked a lot of people. Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigrant-rights group America’s Voice, said details about ICE’s plans should send a chill down every American’s spine.

“Take a teenager with more testosterone than wisdom, arm them with guns and masks, fast cars and—to top it off—dangle cash incentives for indiscriminate and speedy arrests,” she said. “Mix in an ICE culture of impunity and overreach. Now, what could go wrong?”

And there’s precedent for a move like this creating problems. Deb Fleishaker, who served more than a dozen years at DHS, told me that in previous cases when standards were relaxed and hiring spiked, corruption among Customs and Border Patrol agents went through the roof. One study found that arrests of CBP employees rose 44 percent from 2007 to 2012. A New York Times investigation found that over a ten-year period, CBP employees and contractors took $15 million in bribes.

“We’ve seen with DHS when they’ve reduced hiring requirements it’s gone very badly,” Fleishaker said. “I think standards and training are hugely important to doing the job appropriately and carefully. This is further evidence that the Department cares about the numbers of bodies and numbers of arrests, without counterbalancing what the impact of those bodies and arrests will be.”

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What’s in the Heart of an 18-Year-Old ICE Recruit?

WE LIVE IN AN ERA IN WHICH some of the worst leadership has come from some of our oldest politicians. So I’m not going to sit here and say all teens or twentysomethings are evil dummies. That would be inaccurate. But what idea about America does a teenager possess that makes him or her want to aggressively round up immigrants? And, to be clear, that’s precisely how ICE is advertising the gig: an opportunity to round up criminal immigrants.

Some under-21-year-old applicants may be driven by a political ideology that holds the country would be better off with mass deportations. Some may be in a place of despera