What happened

ICE's rush to hire 10,000 new officers under the Trump administration was marked by an AI system erroneously routing hundreds of recruits, many of whom lacked any policing background, into a shortened four-week online "LEO program." 

New officers are supposed to undergo eight-week in-person training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia. 

The error placed undertrained individuals in field offices amid extremely aggressive deportation operations, raising concerns about enforcement errors or risks to communities. 

Why it happened

The root cause was a simplistic, keyword-based algorithmic logic applied to a high-stakes vetting process. Rather than understanding the context of professional experience, the tool operated on a "positive match" for specific titles. 

This technical failure was exacerbated by, political pressure, with the agency under intense pressure to meet a rapid hiring mandate and a year-end deadline, leading to the use of an "untested" model to "cut redundancy."

There was also little human oversight of the system, with the tool initially allowed to make classification decisions without manual verification, removing the "human-in-the-loop" safety net.

Nor was the specific Large Language Model (LLM) or algorithm used publicly vetted, making it difficult for external auditors to identify its propensity for "hallucinating" qualifications based on superficial data.