Whistleblower Reveals That ICE Is Teaching New Recruits to 'Violate the Constitution' and Our Rights

An ICE whistleblower has testified that the organization’s training has been dangerously reduced to accommodate Donald Trump’s deportation surge and that recruits were specifically taught to ignore constitutional protections against search and seizure—in direct contradiction to what the Department of Homeland Security has told Congress.

The New York Times reports:

The account by Ryan Schwank, a former ICE lawyer who worked at the federal government’s law enforcement training academy, coincided with the release by Senate Democrats of several dozen pages of internal ICE records that suggest the Trump administration has curtailed the agency’s basic training.

“For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program,” Mr. Schwank said at a forum held in Washington by congressional Democrats. “Cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program—classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention and the limits of officers’ authority.” …

Mr. Schwank was hired as an ICE lawyer in 2021 and became an instructor last year at the federal government’s law enforcement training academy in Georgia, where he taught courses on the law. He resigned on Feb. 13 after he and another publicly unidentified person submitted a confidential whistle-blower complaint on a separate matter that has raised constitutional questions: a new ICE policy allowing deportation officers to enter homes and arrest people without a judicial warrant.

“ICE is teaching cadets to violate the Constitution,” he said on Monday at the event with congressional Democrats.

Training matters because it indicates what the administrations wants from the agents who enforce its policies—and what this administration wants is for them not to adhere to the Constitution or protections for our rights.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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