ICE’s $50K signing bonus has lured away some State Patrol employees

The Georgia State Patrol’s goal of putting 1,000 troopers on the road is running into an unexpected hurdle: the Trump administration.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has poached a few officers from the patrol in the past year with the promise of $50,000 signing bonus. Georgia state troopers make $63,684 per year once they complete Trooper School.

“We have lost a few employees to ICE because of that,” Department of Public Safety Commissioner Billy Hitchens told state lawmakers during a budget hearing last week.

Law enforcement agencies across the country have struggled to hire people since 2020, when a nationwide scrutiny of law enforcement began in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota. In recent years, police departments across the country have lowered their education standards for new recruits as they seek to boost their pool of applicants.

That apparently hasn’t happened in Georgia, where Hitchens told lawmakers the agency continues “to have stringent standards.”

“If you don’t meet those standards, our agency doesn’t want you in our ranks,” he said, adding it has 864 troopers now, with an additional 80 in training.

The difficulties in recruitment are one reason why ICE offered the $50,000 signing bonuses to attract new agents as the administration rushed to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million people each year.

The bonuses were possible because the Republican-controlled Congress last year passed Trump’s “big, beautiful” spending bill, which swelled ICE’s budget to nearly 10 times what it usually receives. Nearly $30 billion of that money was for hiring 10,000 more staff, The Associated Press reported.

Now, Democrats in the U.S. Senate, including Georgia Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, say they will block a bipartisan spending package that includes $10 million for Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless civil liberties protections are added.

The legislation, which passed the House last week, keeps ICE’s overall budget flat while increasing oversight of the agency and reducing the number of ICE detention beds. But it does not include language pushed for by Democrats aimed at preventing the agency from detaining or deporting U.S. citizens.

The added scrutiny comes after a 37-year-old nurse in Minnesota was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent Saturday. That shooting came nearly two weeks after a woman was shot and killed by immigration agents while in her car.