Nicolle Wallace said the Trump administration’s lowered hiring standards, especially when it comes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, are putting American lives at risk.

The MS NOW host issued the warning on Thursday’s “Deadline: White House,” after what she called a “bombshell” whistleblower complaint made by a 17-year ICE veteran who accused the agency of cutting corners and fast-tracking “improperly vetted” candidates into its ranks.

According to the complaint, first reported by The New York Times, the official said he had witnessed an “unprecedented lowering of standards” that could place the Department of Homeland Security “at risk of infiltration and insider compromise.”

“A healthy organization does not lower its standards for hiring — full stop,” Wallace said. “They just don’t. A healthy, vibrant, magnetic organization doing something that the citizens support doesn’t need to lower the standards to practically none, to attract people to carry out the mission. And that is what is happening at ICE.”

The “Deadline: White House” host said that unlike in other administrations, the “standards for getting hired in Trump 2.0” aren’t qualifications or merit, but simply loyalty to President Donald Trump and his agenda.

“For anyone who wonders why we spend so much time covering the manifestly unqualified, episodically unstable and fearlessly grifty members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, it is because the personal and ethical standards and qualifications of a leader trickle down, for better and, sadly, for worse,” Wallace said. 

“When that’s the case at the very highest levels of government, it permeates to the foot soldiers inside the agencies tasked with carrying out the cruelest part of the Trump administration’s policy agenda,” she added, “and those implications are dangerous.”

Wallace said that because of these lower standards, “lives have been put at risk.” As she explained, since Trump began his aggressive immigration crackdown, there have been constant examples of “ICE agents using aggressively violent and unnecessary tactics.”

“Sometimes those result in the death of migrants, as well as the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti,” she said. “We can’t even expect any suitable or proper accountability when these agents, many of whom we now know, are intentionally unqualified.”

You can watch Wallace’s full commentary in the clip at the top of the page.

The post Nicolle Wallace sounds alarm on ICE hiring after ‘bombshell’ whistleblower report appeared first on MS NOW.

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From MS Now.