Pennsylvania official says county shouldn’t hire ex-ICE, cites liability from ‘terrible culture’

An official in Pennsylvania has warned his jurisdiction to be wary of hiring ICE employees for county jobs, warning they could be a legal liability.

Lehigh County Controller Mark Pinsley said the “terrible culture” at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has tainted anyone who’s been trained by the agency during the second Trump administration, according to a report in Allentown’s The Morning Call newspaper.

“We should at least take a look at this and realize that there is financial risk to hiring someone who is a former ICE agent,” the paper quoted Mr. Pinsley as saying. “These guys, I don’t know, they seemed to have been given a license to kill, maybe not literally.”

He said his conclusions about ICE were based on work by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group with a storied history but which has seen its credibility tumble as it overextended its “hate” designations.

Mr. Pinsley said retraining the officers wouldn’t be enough to cleanse them of the stain of ICE training, which he said has likely left the immigration officers unable to discern threats.

“When Lehigh County hires a former ICE agent, it is not simply hiring an individual with a measurable skills gap. The available evidence indicates it is also accepting exposure to institutionally formed behavioral patterns that retraining has not been shown to reliably correct,” he wrote in his memo, the newspaper reported.

ICE has been on a crash course to hire new personnel, bolstered by billions of dollars provided in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill budget law.

The agency has changed its training schedule, leading to criticism from some members of Congress who say ICE is shirking on readiness at a time when its officers are being pushed into communities to carry out President Trump’s mass deportation mission.

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons refuted the criticism in testimony to Congress earlier this year.

He said that new officers still get the same level of training, but it’s been compressed in time. Where they used to go for five days a week, eight hours per day, they now go 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Mr. Lyons said the curriculum is the same.

“The meat of the training was never removed, the timeline was,” Mr. Lyons said.

Those who were previously certified as federal law enforcement and who are being brought into ICE to push its ranks can get a shorter training, since they already have the firearms and tactics part down and only need instruction on immigration law enforcement, the director said.

Mr. Pinsley’s proposal in Lehigh County would be among the most aggressive anti-ICE stances in the country.

Some jurisdictions have limited official cooperation with the deportation agency, but declaring individual officers to be liability risks pushes anti-ICE sentiment to a new level of resistance.

The Washington Times has sought comment from Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

Mr. Pinsley, a Democrat, had been running for a U.S. House seat but lowered his expectations earlier this year and said he would seek a state Senate seat instead.

In January, he fired off a memo to county officials saying Homeland Security Investigations, part of ICE that handles criminal investigations and doesn’t focus on the basic work of immigration arrests and deportations, hadn’t paid up for a building lease.

He said the total bill at the time was $115,2425.51.

He called for HSI to be evicted.