Whistleblower: New ICE Goons Don't Get No Stinking Training
The rot was already entrenched before the training was downgraded.
An attorney who until last week trained new recruits for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement testified before congressional Democrats Monday that new agents are being rushed through training and being taught to ignore constitutional rights, particularly when it comes to bursting into people’s homes.
Ryan Schwank said he resigned from his position at the federal law enforcement training academy in Georgia last week so he could make public the abuses that DHS is actively teaching its agents to pursue, saying that ICE’s training is “deficient, defective and broken.” He said that what used to be a 580-hour training program had slashed out 240 hours of instruction, including lessons on constitutional limits on use of force and proper methods for arresting people suspected of being in the country illegally.
Keep in mind, of course, that while ICE’s training has gotten worse, the DHS goons who shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis weren’t new recruits who came out of the new regime; both were experienced agents who were already operating lawlessly, whatever their formal training was.
Schwank, who has been an assistant chief counsel at ICE since 2021, also confirmed that new agents are being taught — unlike real police training everywhere in the USA — that they don’t need a judge’s warrant to bust down people’s doors, in line with secret guidance issued by acting ICE bossman Todd Lyons last May. Turns out that Scwhank is one of two whistleblowers who brought that policy change to light in an anonymous complaint through the nonprofit group Whistleblower Aid.
In his opening statement, Schwank said that on his first day teaching at the ICE academy, about five months ago, “I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”
Here’s Schwank’s opening statement; if you have time, go ahead and watch the full forum, which like previous hearings was organized by Democrats from both the House and Senate outside the conventional committee hearing process, because no Republicans would hold hearings about ICE’s abuses.
“Never in my career had I received such a blatant or unlawful order,” he added. In reply to a question from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), he said he was told that if he didn’t teach Lyons’s illegal policy, he would be fired. He added that he understood he’d been brought to the academy to replace another attorney who was “forcibly resigned” for refusing to teach the unconstitutional doctrine.
Schwank detailed some of the worst curriculum cuts, noting that the revised training removed
“16 hours of firearms training, classes that teach them how to use their weapons correctly and safely,” he said. “What was taken out were classes on how the Constitution works. In fact, the class where we talk to the officers and teach them about the rights of protesters was cut from a two-hour program into about 10 minutes that got shoehorned into a lecture about what the concept of seizure is.”
In the Q and A from legislators, Schwank said that even in the last days of training, he had seen cadets in training scenarios “who have drawn their firearms on each other, by accident,” that they made simulated arrests of people who hadn’t broken any law, and that they frequently opted for excessive force, opting to use pepper spray or drawing their weapons in the scenarios when that was unwarranted. He even noted that what used to be closed-book written tests are now open-book, so cadets can look up the right answers before going out on the street and ignoring the law.
He also said that the agency eliminated “practical tests” where cadets would have to demonstrate in a live scenario that they knew and could follow the law. The simulations are now ungraded, meaning that “no matter how badly a cadet does at those practical exams, no matter how many mistakes they make, no matter how egregiously they violate the law […] we graduate them.”
Schwank said that in one exercise that stood out to him, a cadet “pepper sprayed” a bystander for filming an arrest, and when asked why, the cadet said, “Because I’ve seen what we’re doing in Minneapolis.”
Also testifying at the hearing was Teyana Gibson Brown, whose door was knocked down by ICE agents without a warrant in January so they could drag off her husband, Garrison. He fled Liberia’s civil war as a child, but ICE needed to deport him now for a 2008 drug conviction that was later overturned by courts. Since then, as she testified, he has attended all his mandatory check-ins with ICE, the most recent one in December.
This is where we remind you that it’s legal to deport someone for an overturned conviction, or even for an arrest that doesn’t result in charges, but it’s also pretty scummy.
Here’s Gibson Brown’s testimony, with video of the ICE goons storming her home and terrifying her kids with guns drawn, because who cares about rights? She can be heard asking them to show a warrant (the goons ignore her) and telling them “there’s nobody in here but my babies.”
Steve Bunnell, who formerly worked as a general counsel for DHS, testified that the raid was overkill, more like what you’d expect in arresting a violent criminal who was an imminent threat, not someone who has been complying with the conditions ICE set for him to remain in the country. Bunnell said, “these are not the worst of the worst. They have civil rights,” and then MAGA Chuds everywhere screamed at their screens “But he’s an ILLEGAL and a CRIMINAL!!!”
DHS issued its usual boilerplate statement saying that ICE always operates within the law, so shut up, and we won’t bother copying it here. Instead, we’ll go with Schwank’s dismissal of the official lies. “DHS told the public the new cadets receive all the training they need to perform their duties, that no critical material or standards have been cut,” he testified. “This is a lie. ICE made the program shorter, and they removed so many essential parts that what remains is a dangerous husk.”
But hey, who cares about “rights” when there are all these imaginary cannibals out there just waiting to eat our children?
[Minneapolis Star-Tribune (archive link) / WaPo (gift link) / CBS News]
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Seems that not only are they not getting proper training, they're functionally getting anti-training... deliberately carved in a way to encourage anti-constitutional behavior.
I required more training to get my massage license than these bullies do, and an ethics course is mandatory every two years alongside the rest of our continuing education requirement.
It doesn't surprise me that in this stupid fucking country that "yee haw shoot brown people" requires less training than "help people feel better", because we love the parts of the bible that tell us to subjugate the Other but hate the parts that say 'love your neighbor' and 'give to charity' and 'don't be a dick'.