Nearly half of the police academies in America are offered at colleges or technical schools, like ours at Northern Essex Community College in Massachusetts.

At its best, police education and training prepare law enforcement officers with the knowledge and skills—including principles of constitutional law, active listening and verbal de-escalation techniques, implicit bias awareness, how to recognize signs of mental illness or substance abuse, use of force standards, and ethical decision-making and professional conduct—that they will need to protect and serve the public as safely and effectively as possible.

While no amount of training will prepare officers for every challenging situation they will face in their careers, or guarantee that every action they take will have the best outcome, the content, quality, culture and time spent on task of their training can make the difference between lives saved and lives lost.

Neglecting that high-quality training is one of the reasons we have seen so many use-of-force incidents, including shootings and fatalities, involving federal immigration agents over the past year—and why, unless we change course quickly, we are likely going to see more in the months ahead.

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) more than doubled the size of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) workforce, from 10,000 to 22,000 agents, in less than a year, through aggressive recruitment techniques, reduced standards and significantly less training. The results are now appearing, tragically, on the streets of cities across the country.

Between 2015 and 2021, ICE agents were involved in 59 shootings, an average of 10 each year, resulting in 23 deaths.

Since the start of President Trump’s immigration crackdown in cities across the U.S. last summer, federal immigration agents have fired shots in at least 19 separate incidents, resulting in at least five deaths, according to the nonprofit news organization The Trace. This includes the fatal shootings in Minneapolis this month of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and poet, who had recently completed a degree in English at Old Dominion University, and of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital and a University of Minnesota alumnus.

None of this should be surprising.

The sheer number of ICE agents dispatched, military-style, into cities that have specifically asked for them to limit their presence, has increased the likelihood of conflict with local residents.

Potentially more impactful, though, is the insufficient preparation of those agents for their assignments: In order to meet its ambitious recruitment goal, the Department of Homeland Security offered signing bonuses up to $50,000, eliminated age limits, reduced physical fitness standards, and cut training time in about half, to only eight weeks.

In addition, the White House has eviscerated transparency and accountability for ICE and other agencies by eliminating the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, along with a variety of inspectors general and ombudsman positions, while using a steady stream of rhetoric that glamorizes the agency, dehumanizes immigrants, and encourages a gung-ho, no-holds-barred approach to encounters, arrests and deportations.

All of this flies in the face of what educators know works best for community policing, and it is the opposite of the approach we have been taking in Massachusetts and at other college-hosted police academies across the country.

In 2017, I led a statewide task force of police chiefs, elected officials, municipal and higher education leaders that examined police education and training in Massachusetts and made recommendations for improvement.

Our research was clear: The more education, training and practice officers receive, the more likely they are to think critically, solve problems effectively, understand civil rights issues from multiple perspectives, and experience fewer complaints and disciplinary actions; and the less likely they are to use excessive or deadly force.

Since then, the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee, which oversees curriculum and instructional practices for all of the state’s 21-week police academies, has expanded collaborations with educational institutions and shifted from military-style boot camp training to an academy culture that prepares officers for public-facing professional community policing roles.

In 2020, the state created the Massachusetts Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission, designed to bring even greater transparency and accountability to policing in the Commonwealth by requiring certification, discipline and training standards statewide.

In 2021, Northern Essex Community College became the first Massachusetts police academy to become ABLE (Active Bystander for Law Enforcement) certified and now, along with other academies in the state, prepares every officer with an eight-hour course teaching them how to respond if a fellow officer is involved in misconduct.

As a result of rigorous training over time, high standards, a culture of community policing, public transparency and accountability, and increasing access to higher education, Massachusetts has one of the lowest rates of fatal shootings by police in the country, while remaining one of the safest states to live.

However you may feel about the politics of American immigration laws and their enforcement, from the perspective of effective police education and training, the nation’s Department of Homeland Security, through its revised recruitment and training practices, is degrading the preparedness and effectiveness of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Unless DHS changes its practices quickly, or is forced to by pressure from states and members of Congress, and adopts higher standards of education and training and a culture of community policing, the agency is all but guaranteeing there will be more unnecessary deaths at the hands of underprepared ICE officers around the country.