Immigration and Customs Enforcement is on a hiring spree.

The agency better known as ICE is trying to bring 10,000 new agents on board, as the Trump administration continues to aggressively arrest and deport immigrants.

As part of its hiring push, ICE is holding hiring events across the country. The Washington Post’s Robert Klemko reported from one held last week in Arlington. He spoke to Texas Standard about what he saw there. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: So this event was held at a big convention center in Arlington. Can you just give us a sense of what it was like inside?

Robert Klemko: Well, it was in an e-sports arena. So for those not familiar, it’s a giant convention center-like building – sort of like a small stadium where they play competitive video games.

But instead of video games on the large monitor there in this building, there was lots of ICE branding – specifically, their new slogan: “Defend the Homeland.” And there were also videos playing of ICE’s history and its role in combating drug trafficking and human trafficking.

Tell us about who you met there. There were something like 3,000 people that showed up. What motivated them to come to this recruiting event?

I talked to maybe two dozen people on their way out of the event. I think the motivations ran the gamut. Several I quoted in the story.

One person was a former MMA fighter who was looking for an IT job and went and found out they weren’t hiring IT folks. But he vented some of his frustrations at feeling as though he’d hit the ceiling in his IT career because of Indian workers taking American jobs.

There was a young man who was former Air Force who was the great-grandson of Mexican immigrants who felt that illegal immigration contributed to victimizing people who are forced into drug smuggling or being human trafficked and he wanted to put and end, or help put and end, to those crimes.

There was a young man who had been discharged from the Marines for refusing the COVID vaccine several years ago and said that he felt he had no more sense of purpose and felt the itch to serve because he identified with Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort.

Were they motivated by money as well? I mean, what’s the pay look like for these kinds of jobs?

I think that’s a big thing. A number of people I’ve talked to just said they were looking for work and a $50,000 hiring bonus would be fantastic. That’s what ICE is offering to the top-tier recruits that show up during this deportation push.

The vast majority of people won’t be getting anything close to a $50,000 signing bonus, but it’s been effective marketing so far.

So what sort of process did these folks go through? I understand some of them thought they might get hired on the spot.

So, about 700 people actually did get hired on the spot out of that 3,000. And those were tentative job offers pending background checks and drug screenings.

But they did make a lot of tentative job offers last week. They’ve been fast-tracking a lot of the different stages of recruiting. The Atlantic reported last week that they’ve shortened training to 47 days, a significant number because Donald Trump is the 47th president.

ICE is denying that. But basically, everyone brought a one-page resume, and they met with an ICE recruiter, an HR person or an agent who went over their resume. And then they waited. They sat and watched the video about ICE’s history that was playing on big screen. Some people waited an hour to find out whether or not they’d be receiving a tentative job offer right there on the spot.

So for those who did get the offer, they were then sent to do fingerprinting and drug screening.

Well, as someone who’s covered criminal justice and policing for a long time, how would you say these recruitment efforts were different than ones you’ve observed in the past?

You know, I think throughout American history, when we have swells of crime or certain crimes become less tolerated or we have the appearance of a crime surge, I think the reaction of police departments and agencies has traditionally been to ramp up recruitment to get more bodies on the streets fighting that crime or that perceived spike in crime.

More often than not, you see standards quietly or not so quietly lowered. You see training fast-tracked and then you see often constitutional violations come either immediately or some years after that. You think about the crack epidemic in the ’80s and ’90s and some of the hotspot policing teams that were formed to combat that and now hotspot-policing has come out of vogue because of the constitutional violations that became rampant in large cities all across the country.

So there’s sort of a swinging pendulum here when it comes to crime and recruitment without any sort of deviation through the course of American history.