Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the main U.S. immigration enforcement agency, plans to invest $100 million over the course of a year for a massive recruitment drive focused on attracting people who advocate for the right to bear arms or who are military enthusiasts, The Washington Post reports Tuesday.
The program falls under what the agency calls a “wartime recruitment” strategy and seeks to flood social networks, employ influential internet figures from the conservative and anti-immigration spectrum and conduct geolocated advertising campaigns, according to an internal document reviewed exclusively by the newspaper.
ICE plans to recruit more agents
🚨BREAKING: Tom Homan just announced that ICE will be hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. pic.twitter.com/fbS4FKTXTm
– Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) December 21, 2025
The campaign seeks to air ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights or NASCAR races, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown interest in weapons and tactical gear, according to a document of about 30 pages that began circulating internally last summer and details this recruitment strategy
The strategy is articulated through advertisements and influencer broadcasts on Snapchat or Rumble, a video platform popular among conservatives.
But also through an advertising system that uses geolocation known as “geofencing” and sends ads to web browsers and social networks of phones that are located at certain coordinates in certain time windows.
This makes it possible, for example, to send these notifications to anyone who attends a certain sporting event, a weapons fair or simply approaches an establishment that sells tactical equipment or a military base.
In July, the U.S. Congress tripled the budgets for ICE arrest and deportation operations to $30 billion.
The Department of Homeland Security, on which the agency depends, has already spoken publicly about increasing its staff, which currently comprises some 20,000 workers, by an additional 10,000.
Since his return to the White House last January, President Donald Trump has declared war on illegal immigration.
Although the data is not yet clear, it is believed that the U.S. may have deported hundreds of thousands of people this year and that more than one million illegals may have taken advantage of a self-deportation scheme encouraged by the Federal Government.
Filed under: ICE plans to recruit more agents
With information from EFE
