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At David Shaffer Law, we are pursuing a class action against ICE for their lack of gender-normed physical tests and discriminating against our client and other female trainees on the basis of sex. While at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), our client was not only faced with male-tailored physical tests, but also with the male-tailored instructors who singled her out multiple times for minor issues which were overlooked when the male trainees had similar issues. We filed her official, individual and class complaint through the Department of Homeland Security in early January 2021.

As women make up more than half of the U.S. population and account for 47% of all working Americans, they comprise just 13% of law enforcement officers and 15.5% of all sworn federal law enforcement officers (Reaves, 2012). Women in law enforcement have always been underrepresented for various reasons: masculine stigma, recruitment issues, hostile work environment, etc., but one measure that has been repeatedly seen to have a disparate impact on women are the physical examinations.

Within ICE, 71.9% are men and 28.1% are women (Alvarado, 2017). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), unlike other federal law enforcement agencies like the DEA and the FBI, does not use gender-normed physical examinations. Gender-normed tests set different raw cutoffs for male and female applicants such that each class would be expected to have roughly equal pass rates, making it more equitable for women.

We are hoping to retain more female ICE agents with similar gender discrimination issues to expand our case. Therefore, if you, or anyone you know, have been retaliated against from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, please reach out to us as soon as possible.

Federal law enforcement agencies must create an organizational culture that does not tolerate harassment and discrimination and implement policies that highlight women’s contribution in this male-dominated field. While it’ll take a lot more work to change the masculine identity of law enforcement, we believe that the one step in the direction of full gender equity is the inclusion of gender-normed physical tests.