Report: ICE Agents Overworked, Struggling to Effectively Manage Deportations
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report
Thursday which found that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
deportation “does not effectively manage the supervision and
deportation of non-detained aliens.”The report highlighted that many deportation officers “reported overwhelming caseloads and difficulty fulfilling their responsibilities,” and said “ICE does not collect and analyze data about employee workloads to allocate staff judiciously and determine achievable caseloads.”
Officers supervising non-detained aliens have much larger caseloads than those supervising detained aliens, the report found. The average workload for ICE officers supervising non-detained immigrant cases in Washington D.C. is 10,156, while it’s only 100 cases for D.C. ICE officers supervising detained immigrants.
A deportation officer reported that “because of competing work responsibilities criminal background checks are not conducted every time a non-detained alien checks in with the field office.”
"You might work 18 hours a day, but you still won't get caught up," one deportation officer with a heavy caseload of non-detained immigrant cases told the OIG.

