The Crisis of Competence: Why the ICE Hiring Surge is a Threat to Policing Standards
A Special Guest Post by Brent Jablonski
Hello, readers! Back when I was a senior in high school, Brent Jablonski sat next to me in our physics class. As the only junior in the class, he was impressively smart, and it quickly became clear that he was also a terrific guy. We recently reconnected on Substack.
Brent’s dad was a police officer in the Twin Cities metro area for his entire career. He put his life on the line to keep people safe. I mean that literally: He was shot while on duty, and as he lay bleeding in the snow, he had the presence of mind to trace the perp’s license plate number in the snow so that he could be found and arrested. As you’ll see below, Brent has completed the requirements for peace officer training. So Brent has direct personal experience with proper police training and practice.
Brent wrote a comment to last week’s post that was so insightful and well-informed that I thought readers needed to read it. I asked him if I could share it, and he graciously agreed and expanded it into the following article. With the exception of the very end of the article, this entire post is by Brent Jablonski. Brent is on Substsack. You can find him here. Thank you, Brent!
We’ll return next week with a regular Happy Wanderer.
The city of Minneapolis and the broader metro are currently navigating a period of profound, externally induced unrest. The fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good on January 7, 2026, was not merely a tactical error; it was the predictable outcome of a systemic erosion of law enforcement standards. Renee Good—a poet, a mother of three, and an American citizen with no criminal history—was shot by an ICE agent during an enforcement drive that Governor Tim Walz has described as an “occupation.” To me, this tragedy and the subsequent reports of federal law enforcement misconduct reflect a “surge” model that has prioritized hiring volume over competence. This collapse in standards is compounded by a profound lack of federal transparency; the agency has operated in a vacuum of accountability, refusing to fully disclose training criteria or provide local leaders with oversight of the agents now patrolling our streets.
As someone who completed the Minnesota POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) requirements back in 1990, I view the profession through the lens of the “Minnesota Model.” Although I never served as a sworn officer, going through that rigorous process gave me a direct, personal appreciation for the academic and tactical hurdles required to earn a license in this state. Comparing my 1990s experience to the ICE “surge” standards reveals a massive disparity. In Minnesota, the barrier to entry is built on a foundation of higher education and specialized skills; meanwhile, the current federal surge—fueled by the nearly $30 billion infusion from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)—prioritizes the rapid deployment of 10,000 new ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers above all else.
The Minnesota Model: Policing as a Profession
Minnesota is unique in the nation. We are the only state that refuses to “train” someone to be a cop in a few weeks. Instead, we require them to educate themselves first. To even be eligible for a license, the baseline is a two- or four-year Law Enforcement degree from an accredited college.1
1. The Academic Deep Dive
Before a Minnesota candidate ever touches a duty belt, they must navigate a heavy academic curriculum. This isn’t just “cop school”; it is a professional education designed to produce a well-rounded citizen-officer.
Constitutional Law (CON Law): Students spend an entire semester on the Bill of Rights, with a focus on the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. They don’t just learn how to arrest; they learn the legal philosophy of why an arrest is valid and the historical weight of civil liberties.
Police Operations and Theory: This coursework covers the evolution of criminal law, the mechanics of the justice system, and the complexities of police-community relations.
Sociology and Psychology: Mandatory courses in human behavior, ethics, and minority studies ensure that candidates understand the systemic impacts of social forces and the psychology of individuals in crisis.
2. The 10-Week “Skills” Intensive
Once the degree is complete, the candidate enters a 10-week, 400-hour “Skills” program. This is where the theory becomes practice.
Use of Force: Minnesota standards require extensive hours on the Use of Force Continuum, with a heavy emphasis on the “reasonableness” standard.
Conflict De-escalation: This is the core of the Minnesota model. Candidates undergo mandatory blocks of Crisis Intervention Training, learning to recognize mental health crises and to use verbal techniques to avoid physical confrontation.
Public Interaction Simulations: Minnesota candidates spend dozens of hours in “Scenario Training,” where they are graded on their interactions with both victims and offenders. These simulations test a candidate’s ability to navigate high-stress human encounters with professional restraint.
The 48-Day Federal Officer: A Dangerous Departure
To meet the OBBBA mandate of 10,000 new officers by mid-January 2026, ICE ERO has condensed its traditional 5-month academy to just 8 weeks (roughly 48 training days).2 This “mission-specific” approach is designed to get personnel into the field as fast as possible, but it lacks the broad academic and legal foundation we require in Minnesota. In fact ICE more than doubled the number of officers and agents since 2025, from 10,000 to 22,000. So more than half of all ICE officers may be inexperienced and undertrained.
The Missing Pieces
In the current ICE ERO academy, these long-form professional standards are replaced by shortcuts:
The “CON Law” Gap: While Homeland Security Investigations agents and FBI agents get deep legal instruction, an ERO Surge officer receives only a fraction of that time. Their legal training is focused on immigration statutes rather than the broad Constitutional protections that local officers are drilled on for years.
The De-escalation Deficit: In an 8-week academy, time is a zero-sum game. To ensure recruits meet basic firearms and administrative benchmarks, the “soft skills” are the first to be sacrificed. Conflict management, de-escalation, and simulation training require weeks of repetition to master; in the 2026 surge, these are often reduced to a few hours of lecture or skipped entirely.
No Degree Required: ICE now allows work experience to substitute for a degree. This means an officer can be on the streets of the Twin Cities without a single college credit in ethics, psychology, or sociology.
Tech over Training: They have even removed the Spanish language requirement, replacing the linguistic and cultural immersion with translation apps. This removes the “human” element of communication in high-stakes environments.
The FBI: The Elite Standard
While ICE surges, the FBI Academy at Quantico remains the benchmark. Their 20-week program packs 800 hours of academics and behavioral science.3 Uniquely, they require trainees to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the MLK Memorial to study what happens when law enforcement loses its core values.
Prerequisites: They still mandate a four-year degree and significant prior professional work experience.
Immersion: Their 18–20 week academy is a total-immersion experience, packing hundreds of instructional hours into a residential environment.
The FBI remains “elite” precisely because it refuses to sacrifice its academic and professional requirements for the sake of hiring volume.
2026 Training & Standards Comparison
The Reality of Reciprocity
Under 2026 Minnesota law, a graduate of the ICE ERO 8-week academy cannot become a police officer in Minnesota. They do not meet our standards. Even with federal experience, Minnesota requires a “Reciprocity Exam” and often additional coursework because our state board (POST) recognizes that an 8-week tactical course is not a substitute for a professional education.
Final Thought
Some of the misconduct I’ve seen in the past week is well beyond the pale—obviously and fundamentally wrong. I believe this is a direct symptom of a significant and dangerous training gap. While we in Minnesota are accustomed to a model where a badge represents years of higher education and rigorous tactical preparation, we are now seeing federal agents operating in our streets with only eight weeks of total instruction.
In my view, ICE ERO officers are being deployed while untrained to a degree that is patently dangerous. Rather than addressing these systemic failures, ICE appears to be rubber-stamping questionable behavior and refusing to even investigate allegations of misconduct. This erosion of standards can only result in further tragedies on our streets.
But I’m actually presenting the rosy view. Because if we were instead to assume that the majority of ICE officers deployed to the Twin Cities are in fact highly trained, it speaks to an even deeper and more fundamental problem: It suggests that the lack of transparency is not a logistical hurdle, but a tactical choice to insulate agents from the consequences of their actions. It suggests that the conduct we are seeing isn’t an accident of poor preparation, but a deliberate feature of their version of law enforcement.
Lowering standards and gutting accountability are inherently incompatible with professional policing. Regaining public trust will require a willingness to investigate complaints fully, absolute transparency in doing so, and—most of all—the return to former levels of training for ICE ERO officers, applied retroactively where necessary. Fortunately, I’m not alone in calling for these changes. The Federal Law Enforcement Standards and Accountability (FLESA) Act, recently introduced by Senator Cory Booker, aims to restore these very benchmarks. By establishing clear, enforceable minimum standards for hiring, training, and suitability assessments, the FLESA Act would finally force federal agencies to meet the professional bar that states like Minnesota set decades ago. Without such a mandate, we are simply inviting more tragedies into our neighborhoods.
(Thank you again, Brent! And now, back to Mari the Happy Wanderer.)
This morning Brent drew my attention to this news story, which reports that ICE is also detaining off-duty Minnesota police officers, all of whom are US citizens. As Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley says,
“Every one of these individuals is a person of color.
. . .
“This isn’t just important because it happened to off-duty officers, but what it did do is we know that our officers know what the Constitution is, they know what right and wrong is, and they know when people are being targeted. And that’s what they were.”
The chiefs stressed they support lawful immigration enforcement but say these tactics violate civil rights and are undoing years of trust-building between police and the communities they serve.
How about you, readers? Did you learn anything new from Brent’s article? (I know I did!) What can we do to insist that the officers that have power over us are properly trained? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
Speaking of awesome dads, check out this happy guy, from a cartoon by Emily Bernstein in the December 22, 2025 edition of the New Yorker:
Reflecting on Mari’s kind words in the introduction, I wanted to reciprocate. I recently described her to my wife this way: 'Mari is the only person I’ve known who can make me feel intellectually intimidated—not because she’s trying to, but because she has a way of finding the holes in my knowledge and making me want to fill them.' I find this still happens frequently; even now, I rarely finish one of her articles without discovering a new horizon to explore.
This is a fantastically informative piece, but I feel (well, suspect without any solid evidence) that the problem is less the how than the why. Specifically: while it's bad that ICE agents have utterly inadequate training, the deeper problem is that the agency seems now to be geared towards recruiting people who very much want to beat immigrants up. The fundamental problem with the Brownshirts wasn't lack of training, either.
Somehow, I doubt Renee Good's murderer went home that night feeling disturbed and traumatised by his actions.