The Trump administration’s rapid scaling of ICE (which announced in early January 2026 that it had grown by 120%, adding 12,000 agents to an existing force of 10,000) raises the question of whether training and vetting standards can keep pace with recruitment targets. It’s a question with a surprising historical antecedent.
As historian Richard F. Hamm of the University at Albany writes in The Conversation, the early years of Prohibition enforcement offer a cautionary tale. The Bureau of Prohibition became the largest federal law enforcement body by 1930, with 1,450 front-line agents dwarfing the FBI’s 350. But training never caught up. When agents were finally subjected to civil service testing, 60% failed. Over 750 were dismissed for misconduct, most commonly drunkenness (!) or bribery. A federal judge described three-quarters of them as “ward heelers and sycophants named by the politicians.”
The consequences were not merely bureaucratic. Agents averaged over half a million arrests per year, and by one count roughly 1,000 people were killed in enforcement actions, including a sitting U.S. senator struck in the head by a stray bullet near the Capitol.
Hamm takes care to note the differences: Prohibition was broadly unpopular in ways that some aspects of immigration enforcement (primarily at the border) are not, and Congress has funded ICE generously in a way it never did for Prohibition agents. But the structural similarity is hard to dismiss: a federal enforcement apparatus was expanded hastily, where training and oversight lagged behind ambition, staffed by people authorized to use force to carry out a difficult mandate.
And the Prohibition parallel raises another point. The Eighteenth Amendment mandating prohibition was repealed after just thirteen years, because the country concluded the policy itself was misguided. The enforcement problems weren’t incidental to Prohibition; they were a symptom of asking a sprawling federal apparatus to suppress something that much of the population didn’t want suppressed.