It’s easy to treat this like “ICE is hiring.” But the real shift is: validation is being stripped while enforcement capacity scales.

I’m not arguing about whether enforcement should exist. I’m arguing the mechanism changed: how field judgment gets trained and proven before it’s deployed.

New DHS whistleblower documents show ICE accelerating ERO officer output while cutting the checks that used to certify competence. 

• Target: ~4,000 new ERO officers in FY2026 
• Practical gatekeeping: required hands-on exams cut from 25 → 9 
• Training time:

“consists of 72 training days (excluding weekends and Federal holidays) with a total of 584 hours”

“42 training days”

(about ~250 fewer hours implied by the schedules) 

• Sworn testimony vs docs:

“reduce[d] the actual calendar days from 75 to 42… We went from five days a week to six days a week… We’ve gone to six 12-hour days”,

but the model schedule shows standard nine-hour days for cohorts 

This doesn’t require malice. It’s what “hit the graduation number” does to any pipeline: written testing replaces real-world evaluation, and discretion gets pushed downstream.

When you compress training, you don’t just move faster. You move judgment into the field.

What evidence would distinguish “responsible scaling” from “throughput at the expense of validation”?