Jan. 5, 2026

Wartime Recruitment for American Soil

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ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.

Washington Post December 31, 2025

The current administration has transformed ICE into exactly what we used to condemn in failed states: a paramilitary mercenary force that wages war on its own residents.

According to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is spending $100 million over one year on what it explicitly calls “wartime recruitment.” The agency’s own 30-page strategy document states the goal plainly: help Trump’s mass-deportation agenda “dominate media networks and recruitment channels.” This is how autocracies staff their dirty work.

Compare the 1917 Uncle Sam recruitment poster with ICE’s current recruitment materials and the visual parallel says everything. Uncle Sam recruited citizens to defend against foreign armies. ICE is recruiting mercenaries to wage war on residents living on American soil.

In functional democracies, civil service agencies recruit through proper channels: USAJobs, university career fairs, professional law enforcement conferences. They emphasize educational qualifications, legal expertise, constitutional training. ICE’s $100 million blitz targets a different demographic entirely. The agency is geo-targeting ads at people who attend UFC fights, listen to patriotic podcasts, and shop for tactical gear. They’re partnering with online influencers in gun culture communities. They’re setting up recruitment booths at gun shows. Notice what’s absent: any requirement for education, understanding of immigration law, or training in constitutional rights. This is mercenary recruitment. Find people who need money, appeal to their cultural identity, promise them power and authority, and deploy them against a demonized population.

The language reveals everything. In wartime, enemies are dehumanized. Collateral damage is acceptable. Speed and force replace due process. When you recruit using wartime rhetoric, when you specifically target people drawn to combat sports and tactical operations, you’re not building a workforce that will carefully weigh humanitarian implications. You’re building a force that sees resistance as enemy action and efficiency as the only virtue. A person stops being a case file with complicated circumstances. They become a mission target.

Here’s how it works in countries we used to criticize: The government identifies an internal “threat”—usually a vulnerable minority population. It creates a specialized enforcement unit with paramilitary characteristics. It staffs that unit not with career civil servants but with mercenaries drawn from specific cultural and economic demographics. It gives them broad authority and minimal oversight. It deploys them with increasing aggression while claiming to simply “enforce the law.” The enforcers aren’t held accountable because that’s the design. They operate in the shadows—predawn raids, detention facilities closed to media, deportations completed before legal challenges can proceed.

Sound familiar? ICE already operates with minimal oversight. The agency has conducted raids based on faulty information, detained U.S. citizens, separated families, and presided over deaths in custody—all with virtually no consequences. Officers have arrested people at courthouses, hospitals, and schools. The agency fights transparency at every turn. Now inject thousands of new officers recruited specifically for their affinity with force and firearms into this accountability vacuum.

Mercenaries aren’t invested in the communities where they operate. They’re there for a paycheck and whatever psychological needs the work satisfies—power, belonging, the thrill of authority. This creates a specific kind of violence. There’s no restraint that comes from knowing you’ll see your victims at the grocery store, that their children go to school with yours. Mercenaries are deployed precisely because they lack those connections and constraints. ICE’s recruitment strategy is designed to find people who will see immigrant communities as foreign, threatening, other. People whose primary exposure to immigration comes through politically charged media, not human relationships. People who can dehumanize easily because they’ve never had to see immigrants as neighbors, colleagues, friends.

Mass deportation requires mass cruelty. There’s no gentle way to tear apart hundreds of thousands of families. The officers ICE is recruiting aren’t equipped to grapple with that human cost. They’re being recruited precisely because they won’t. Expect more aggressive workplace raids conducted with overwhelming force. Expect more arrests at schools and hospitals. Expect higher rates of force, more injuries, more deaths. Most importantly, expect the trauma to spread far beyond those directly targeted. When ICE conducts a raid, entire communities go into hiding. Children stop going to school. People stop seeking medical care. This is the point—to create a climate of fear so pervasive that millions become invisible, voiceless, unable to assert any rights. This is what mercenary forces do. They don’t just enforce—they occupy.

Banana republics don’t emerge fully formed. They’re built through choices that seem defensible in isolation but accumulate into something monstrous. But spending $100 million to recruit mercenaries through gun shows and UFC-targeted ads? Explicitly framing immigration enforcement as “wartime” operations? Building a force specifically designed to operate without the constraints of education, expertise, or community connection? That’s a choice to abandon the pretense of democratic law enforcement in favor of something much darker.

The United States didn’t always have ICE—the agency was created in 2003. The current trajectory isn’t inevitable. It’s chosen. And it can be unchosen. But that requires recognizing this moment for what it is: not a policy adjustment, but a fundamental break with democratic norms. ICE is building a mercenary army to wage war on vulnerable populations. The $100 million recruitment campaign tells us exactly who they intend to hire and what they intend to do.

We know how these stories end. We’ve seen this pattern play out in dozens of countries. The question is whether we’re paying attention, or whether we’ll look back years from now and claim we never saw it coming—even as it happened right in front of us with a $100 million budget and ads during UFC fights.

FTS