On Thursday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” former acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf stated that “vetting takes [an] extremely long time, and there [are] not enough individuals that are doing the vetting.” And that isn’t unique to ICE, “What’s unique, right now, is the fact that ICE is hiring so many so quickly. And there are certainly challenges.”
Wolf said, “[T]he reporting that I’ve seen doesn’t say that they’re cutting back on the background checks and the vetting of these ICE officers. What they’re saying is, they can’t keep up with the amount of hiring that they’re doing. And this isn’t just an ICE problem. This goes for law enforcement in general. This goes for national security positions in the federal government. The vetting takes [an] extremely long time, and there [are] not enough individuals that are doing the vetting.”
He continued, “And so what a lot of law enforcement agencies do, state, local, and federal, is, you will preliminarily hire an individual. You’ll put them in a certain position until their full background check, everything comes back, and then you can put them in other, forward-[facing] positions. So, this isn’t unique. What’s unique, right now, is the fact that ICE is hiring so many so quickly. And there are certainly challenges. I’m not going to sit here and say there are not challenges with that. But I don’t think that — there’s an allegation that, somehow, ICE is trying to cut down on the vetting of the candidates. They’re going through the regular vetting, it’s just the vetting cannot keep pace with the number of officers they’re bringing in.”
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