ICE Urged to Improve Recruitment, Accountability to Ensure Success of Elite Shadow Wolves Unit
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is urged to refine its strategy to ensure the continued success of the Shadow Wolves, a 50-year-old highly trained tracking unit made up entirely of Native American members in southern Arizona.
The report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on the Shadow Wolves is required under the 2022 Shadow Wolves Enhancement Act.
Tohono O'odham Nation members make up the unit, whose tribal lands sit on 76 miles of the Mexican border. According to ICE, the unit contributed to hundreds of arrests and the seizure of tens of thousands of pounds of drugs between 2010 and 2020.
GAO reviewed ICE policy on the Shadow Wolves, after ICE leadership changed the unit’s primary focus in 2015 to conducting investigations, gathering evidence, and serving warrants, from its prior focus of fighting smuggling from Mexico to Arizona.
However, GAO said ICE did not update the program’s mission, goals, or staffing needs when it changed the mission.
“Doing so would better position ICE to ensure that Shadow Wolves operations are having the desired impacts. Further, once ICE defines the mission and goals, determining the program's staffing needs would better position ICE to develop recruitment efforts that help accomplish those goals,” wrote GAO in its report.
In 2022, ICE issued a recruitment and expansion strategy for the program, which includes expanded recruiting beyond the unit’s traditional Tohono O'odham Nation reservation in Sells, Arizona to other tribal lands. The unit currently has just eight members, with six already eligible for retirement.
While GAO applauded ICE’s strategy of partnering with colleges and reaching out to tribal law enforcement officers, GAO said the strategy would be more effective if it included goals, timelines, and milestones.
“Adding these elements would enable ICE to assess the effectiveness of the agency's recruitment plans,” GAO said.
ICE was also urged to develop criteria for evaluating and selecting expansion locations to help “ensure officials evaluate locations consistently and transparently.”
GAO made six recommendations. ICE concurred with all six.
Shadow Wolves Enhancement Act
As mentioned, the report is required under the 2022 Shadow Wolves Enhancement Act.
The act reclassified the Shadow Wolves from officers to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) tactical agents, allowing them to not only patrol the desert, but also to investigate, interdict, and disrupt criminal activity on their land.
“The Shadow Wolves Enhancement Act will dramatically increase agency effectiveness in targeting and disrupting human and drug smugglers throughout the rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert and across tribal lands,” said ICE Acting Director Tae D. Johnson at the time. “The reclassification of the Shadow Wolves broadens the authority of an elite law enforcement program while preserving the unit’s historic legacy and augments critical state and federal partnerships while furthering our broad national security missions.”