As federal prisons run low on food and toilet paper, corrections officers leave in droves for ICE

After years of struggling to find enough workers for some of the nation’s toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a new challenge: Corrections officers are jumping ship for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This is one of the unintended consequences of the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations. For months, ICE has been on a recruiting blitz, offering $50,000 starting bonuses and tuition reimbursement at an agency that has long offered better pay than the federal prison system. For many corrections officers, it’s been an easy sell.

Workers at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted off the number of co-workers who’d left for ICE or were in the process of doing so. Six at one lockup in Texas, eight at another. More than a dozen at one California facility, and over four dozen at a larger one. After retirements and other attrition, by the start of November the agency had lost at least 1,400 more staff this year than it had hired, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.

“We’re broken and we’re being poached by ICE,” one official with the prison workers union told ProPublica. “It’s unbelievable. People are leaving in droves.”

The exodus comes amid shortages of critical supplies, from food to personal hygiene items, and threatens to make the already grim conditions in federal prisons even worse. Fewer corrections officers means more lockdowns, less programming and fewer health care services for inmates, along with more risks to staff and more grueling hours of mandatory overtime. Prison teachers and medical staff are being forced to step in as corrections officers on a regular basis.

And at some facilities, staff said the agency had even stopped providing basic hygiene items for officers, such as paper towels, soap and toilet paper.

“I have never seen it like this in all my 25 years,” an officer in Texas told ProPublica. “You have to literally go around carrying your own roll of toilet paper. No paper towels, you have to bring your own stuff. No soap. I even ordered little sheets that you put in an envelope and it turns to soap because there wasn’t any soap.”

The prisons bureau did not answer a series of emailed questions. In a video posted Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Director Josh Smith said that the agency was “left in shambles by the previous administration” and would take years to repair. Staffing levels, he said, were “catastrophic,” which, along with crumbling infrastructure and corruption, had made the prisons less safe.

Smith said that he and Director William Marshall III had been empowered by the Trump administration to “confront these challenges head-on,” adding, “Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of our mission to make the BOP great again, and we’re going to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”

ICE, meanwhile, responded to a request for comment by forwarding a press release that failed to answer specific questions but noted that the agency had made more than 18,000 total tentative job offers as of mid-September.

The BOP has long faced challenges, from sex abuse scandals and contraband problems to crumbling infrastructure and poor medical care. It has repeatedly been deemed the worst federal workplace by one analysis of annual employee surveys, and in 2023 union officials said that some 40% of corrections officer jobs sat vacant.

That dearth of officers helped land the prison system on a government list of high-risk agencies with serious vulnerabilities and attracted the eye of oversight officials, who blamed chronic understaffing for contributing to at least 30 prisoner deaths.

The bureau tried tackling the problem with a long-term hiring push that included signing bonuses, retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. By the start of the year, that effort seemed to be working.

Kathleen Toomey, then the bureau’s associate deputy director, told members of Congress in February that the agency had just enjoyed its most successful hiring spree in a decade, increasing its ranks by more than 1,200 in 2024.

“Higher staffing levels make institutions safer,” she told a House appropriations subcommittee.

But the costly efforts to reel in more staff strained a stagnant budget that was already stretched thin. Toomey told Congress the bureau had not seen a funding increase since 2023, even as it absorbed millions in pay raises and retention incentives. As inflation and personnel costs rose, the bureau was forced to cut its operating budgets by 20%, Toomey said.

And despite some improvement, the staffing problems persisted. In her February testimony, Toomey acknowledged there were still at least 4,000 vacant positions, leaving the agency with so few officers that prison teachers, nurses and electricians were regularly being ordered to abandon their normal duties and fill in as corrections officers.

Then ICE rolled out its recruiting drive.

“At first it seemed like it was going to be no big deal, and then over the last week or so we already lost five, and then we have another 10 to 15 in various stages of waiting for a start date,” an employee at one low-security facility told ProPublica in October. “For us that’s almost 20% of our custody staff.”

He, like most of the prison workers and union officials who spoke to ProPublica, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — a concern that has grown since the agency canceled the union’s contract in September following an executive order. Now union leaders say they’ve been warned that without their union protections, they could be punished for speaking to the media.

After the contract’s cancellation, many of the current staff who had originally spoken on the record asked to have their names withheld. Those who still agreed to be identified asked ProPublica to note that their interviews took place before the agency revoked the union agreement.

Earlier this year, Brandy Moore White, national president of the prison workers union, said it’s not unprecedented to see a string of prison staffers leaving the agency, often in response to changes that significantly impact their working conditions. Prior government shutdowns, changes in leadership and the pandemic all drove away workers — but usually, she said, people leaving the agency en masse tended to be near the end of their careers. Now, that’s not the case.

“This is, from what I can remember, the biggest exodus of younger staff, staff who are not retirement-eligible,” she said. “And that’s super concerning to me.”

ICE’s expansion has even thrown a wrench into BOP’s usual training program for rookies. Normally, new officers have to take a three-week Introduction to Correctional Techniques course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Georgia within their first 60 days on the job, according to the prisons bureau’s website. In August, FLETC announced that it would focus only on “surge-related training,” pausing programs for other law enforcement agencies until at least early 2026, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica. Afterward, FLETC said in a press release that it was “exploring temporary solutions” to “meet the needs of all partner agencies,” though it’s not clear whether any of those solutions have since been implemented. The centers did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

At the same time, the effects of the budget crunch were starting to show. In recent months, more than 40 staff and prisoners at facilities across the country have reported cutbacks even more severe than the usual prison scarcities.

In September, Moore White told ProPublica some prisons had fallen behind on utility and trash bills. At one point, she said, the prison complex in Oakdale, Louisiana, was days away from running out of food for inmates before the union — worried that hungry prisoners would be more apt to riot — intervened, nudging agency higher-ups to address the problem, an account confirmed by two other prison workers. (Officials at the prison complex declined to comment.) Elsewhere, staff and prisoners reported shortages — no eggs in a California facility and no beef in a Texas lockup where staff said they were doling out smaller portions at mealtimes.

Earlier this year, a defense lawyer complained that the Los Angeles detention center ran out of pens for prisoners in solitary confinement, where people without phone or e-messaging privileges rely on snail mail to contact the outside world. One of his clients was “rationing his ink to write letters to his family,” the attorney said. The center didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Personal hygiene supplies have been running low, too. Several prisoners said their facilities had become stingier than usual with toilet paper, and women incarcerated in Carswell in Texas reported a shortage of tampons. “I was told to use my socks,” one said. The facility did not answer questions from ProPublica about conditions there.

Fewer staff has meant in some cases that inmates have lost access to care. At the prison complex in Victorville, California, staff lodged written complaints accusing the warden of skimping on the number of officers assigned to inmate hospital visits in order to cut back on overtime. (The complex did not respond to a request for comment.) In some instances, the complaints alleged, that left so few officers at the hospital that ailing inmates missed the procedures that had landed them there in the first place.

Chyann Bratcher, a prisoner at Carswell, a medical lockup in Texas, said she missed an appointment for rectal surgery — something she’d been waiting on for two years — because there weren’t enough staff to take her there. She was able to have the procedure almost two months later, after another cancellation.

Staffers say several facilities have started scheduling recurring “blackout” days, when officers are banned from working overtime in an effort to save money. Instead, prison officials turn to a practice known as “augmentation,” where they direct teachers, plumbers and medical staff to fill in as corrections officers.

“That’s why I left,” said Tom Kamm, who retired in September from the federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, after 29 years with the bureau. “My job was to try to settle EEO complaints, so if somebody alleged discrimination against the agency it was my job to look into it and try to resolve it.”

When he found out earlier this year that he would soon be required to work two shifts per week as a corrections officer, he decided to retire instead.

“I hadn’t been an officer in a housing unit since like 2001 — it had been like 24 years,” he said. “I had really no clue how to do that anymore.”

Augmentation isn’t new, but staff and prisoners at some facilities say it’s being used more often than it once was. It also means fewer medical staff available to address inmates’ needs. “Today we had a Physical Therapist as a unit officer so all of his PT appointments would have been cancelled,” Brian Casper, an inmate at the federal medical prison in Missouri, wrote in an email earlier this year. “Yesterday one of the other units had the head of Radiology for the unit officer so there would have been one less person doing x-rays and CT scans.” The prison didn’t respond to emailed questions.

When the government shutdown hit in October, it only made the situation worse, exacerbating the shortages and increasing the allure of leaving the bureau. While ICE agents and corrections officers continued bringing home paychecks, thousands of prison teachers, plumbers and nurses did not.

The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic policy megabill that Trump signed into law on July 4, could offer some financial support for the agency’s staffing woes, as it will route another $5 billion to the prisons bureau over four years — $3 billion of which is specifically earmarked to improve retention, hiring and training. Yet exactly what the effects of that cash infusion will look like remains to be seen: Though the funding bill passed more than four months ago, in November the bureau declined to answer questions about when it will receive the money or how it will be spent.