WASHINGTON — On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced in an internal email that it would offer cash bonuses to agents for deporting people quickly, an incentive meant to motivate the staff to speed up President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Less than four hours later, the agency abruptly canceled what was supposed to be a 30-day pilot program.
“PLEASE DISREGARD,” Liana J. Castano, an official in ICE’s field operations division, said in a follow-up email to agency offices around the country.
Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, said the program had not been authorized by agency leaders, adding that “no such policy is in effect or has ever been in effect.” The email canceling the program was sent shortly after The New York Times inquired about its existence.
But the short-lived effort underscored the mounting pressure on ICE to meet Trump’s aggressive deportation targets. The agency has offered signing bonuses of up to $50,000, promised to hire as many as 10,000 agents and initiated a vigorous recruiting push on social media.
The Trump administration is seeking to transform ICE, infusing it with an enthusiasm for the president’s project of carrying out deportations on an unprecedented scale. Under Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, which he signed into law early last month, ICE’s annual budget will grow from about $8 billion to roughly $28 billion, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.
Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers and the architect of his immigration policy, has promoted ICE’s hiring drive in ideological terms.
“Want to mass deport illegals from Los Angeles?” he wrote on social media last week. “JOIN.ICE.GOV today and get a 50K signing/retention bonus. Make your family proud and be the hero America needs.”
Last week, the agency said it had issued more than 1,000 tentative job offers.
The bonus program that ended Tuesday almost as quickly as it began had been described as a 30-day pilot, according to documents reviewed by the Times. Under its terms, ICE would hand out $200 bonuses for each immigrant deported within seven days of being arrested and $100 for those deported within two weeks, according to an initial memo signed by Castano that was sent to the directors and deputy directors of ICE’s field offices across the country.
It was meant to motivate officers to reduce a backlog of people awaiting deportation, “reducing overall removal costs and decreasing strain” on the agency’s detention resources, the memo stated.
To “maximize” their bonuses, the memo instructed ICE agents to deport eligible immigrants through a fast-track process known as expedited removal, which allows immigrants without legal status to be deported without court proceedings. It also said that agents could offer detainees the option of leaving the country voluntarily.
Castano did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Efforts to speed the pace of deportations — like the bonus program — could endanger the due process rights of immigrants by encouraging ICE agents to cut corners, immigration experts and former government officials said.
“That is so ungodly unethical,” said Scott Shuchart, a former senior homeland security official. “You can’t incentivize government agents to short-circuit people’s procedural rights. Would you pay a bonus to judges for wrapping up trials faster?”
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the incident appeared to reflect how quickly ICE was moving to meet Trump’s goals.
“They’re willing to try so many different things to see what sticks,” she said.
ICE has already sped up deportations, according to a New York Times analysis of ICE data obtained via the Deportation Data Project. The share of people booked into ICE detention who were deported within 14 days increased to 30% in May, from 21% in January, the analysis showed.
And the number of deportations by ICE reached a new high in July, averaging almost 1,300 daily removals in the two weeks ending July 26. Removals averaged fewer than 800 per day in the last year of the Biden administration.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
