Lillian Curtin

Offering student loan repayment as a recruitment tactic for new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents is disturbing, but most of all, it is hypocritical.

On July 29, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new ICE campaign to “recruit brave and heroic Americans to join ICE…and remove the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from America’s streets.”

The campaign, titled “Defend the Homeland,” introduces new incentives for people to join ICE as federal law enforcement agents. These benefits include enhanced retirement benefits, up to a $50,000 signing bonus and student loan repayment of up to $60,000.

The campaign’s funding comes from the $170 billion allocated to immigration and border efforts by the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law on July 4, 2025. 

The bill gives ICE approximately $30 billion over four years to track down, arrest and deport immigrants. That amount is a 300% increase over ICE’s entire $10 billion budget last year.

The new ICE recruitment efforts, which include removing age restrictions on who can join and distributing posters that mimic WWII propaganda, are haphazard attempts to meet President Donald Trump’s goal of hiring 10,000 new ICE agents and deporting one million people a year.

While ICE is using its obscene new budget to repay agents’ loans and give away signing bonuses, our government is trying to restrict who can receive student loan forgiveness under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF). The program allows certain government employees and people who work for nonprofits (public service workers) to have their federal loans forgiven after they’ve made payments for at least 10 years.

The program has always had problems, with a majority of workers not receiving loan forgiveness despite eligibility. However, more than one million borrowers were approved for loan forgiveness during the Biden-Harris administration, more than ever before.

In March, President Trump issued an executive order calling on the Department of Education (DOE) to draft new regulations restricting student loan forgiveness through PSLF, according to Forbes.

The executive order asked for the new definition of “public service” to exclude organizations that “engage in activities that have a substantial illegal purpose.” His first example of an illegal purpose was “aiding or abetting violations of 8 U.S.C. 1325 or other Federal immigration laws.” Surprise surprise.

The DOE published its proposed new restrictions for PSLF on Aug. 18.

They are not yet in effect, but the new regulations have been released for public inspection, meaning citizens can view the proposal and argue certain aspects. The period for inspection will end Sept. 17. After which, a final rule will be published and put into effect July 1, 2026, according to an article by the CSLA Institute.

If this plan succeeds, which it probably will, the already disproportionate number of government workers receiving loan forgiveness will drop dramatically.

Our President has made it clear that those not in full support of his abusive immigration plan are to receive no federal loan forgiveness. They don’t fit his definition of public service. But ICE agents?

They deserve to have their debts paid! To him, the excess government spending isn’t wasteful as long as it is funding racism.

No matter your political beliefs, the hypocrisy is hard to miss. Thousands of government workers, such as prosecutors and nurses working in community healthcare (jobs that require advanced degrees), could lose access to loan forgiveness. Meanwhile, ICE agents (most of whom don’t even need an undergraduate degree, depending on their position), are having loan repayment dangled in front of them like a carrot in this new campaign.

Department of Education officials, in a news release about the proposed cuts to PSLF, described the new regulations as a way to prevent taxpayer dollars from being “improperly provided” to borrowers whose employers are engaging in “illegal” practices.

That’s ironic. I thought that kidnapping women and children off the street, holding innocent people in privately owned detention facilities with horrific conditions and violating due process to deport citizens would be considered “illegal” practices. But hey, at least some ICE agents won’t have to worry about their debt anymore.