They Are Training Officers to Disregard the Constitution
What ICE’s internal whistleblower just revealed is worse than anyone feared
By Dr. John Petrone
This is no longer a warning.
This is an admission.
A former Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney and legal instructor is expected to testify before Congress that ICE is lying to Congress and the American people about how it trains new officers. Not exaggerating. Not spinning. Lying.
According to his prepared testimony, the federal government is now graduating thousands of armed enforcement officers who do not understand their constitutional duties, do not know the limits of their authority, and are not trained to recognize unlawful orders.
That is not a training gap.
That is the collapse of the rule of law.
What He Is Saying Under Oath
Ryan Schwank is not a disgruntled agent or a political activist. He is a lawyer who taught the legal curriculum to new ICE recruits at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia. He resigned rather than continue participating in what he describes as a broken and dangerous system.
In sworn testimony, Schwank says ICE’s training program has been stripped down to the point that it is now deficient, defective, and incapable of producing constitutionally competent officers. He warns that without reform, ICE will deploy thousands of new agents who do not know when an order is illegal and do not know they have a duty to refuse it.
He is explicit about the consequences.
People will be unlawfully arrested.
Constitutional rights will be violated.
And people will be killed.
The Most Alarming Detail
According to Schwank, on his very first day as a legal instructor, he was shown a secretive memo and instructed to teach cadets that ICE officers could enter private homes without consent or a judicial warrant signed by a judge.
That is not a gray area.
That is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The memo, he says, carried none of the markings of formal legal guidance. It was presented quietly, with instructions to read it and return it immediately. He was warned that two previous instructors had already been dismissed for questioning its legality.
In other words, ICE was not just issuing unlawful guidance. It was enforcing silence.
This is not rogue behavior. Schwank says the acting ICE director authorized conduct that even DHS training materials have previously described as the very abuse the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent.
What They Cut to Make This Happen
This constitutional breakdown did not occur accidentally.
ICE is in the middle of a massive hiring surge, expanding its force by tens of thousands of agents to meet Trump’s mass deportation quotas. To do that, the agency gutted training.
According to internal documents shared with Congress, more than a dozen practical exams have been eliminated. Training in judgment based firearm use, criminal encounters, and use of force simulations has been removed. Legal instruction distinguishing criminal proceedings from civil removal proceedings has been cut.
Despite public claims to the contrary, new recruits are now receiving hundreds fewer hours of training than prior classes. The program has been nearly cut in half.
You cannot remove half the training and pretend nothing changed.
What remains, Schwank says, is a dangerous husk.
This Is Already Killing People
This testimony does not exist in a vacuum.
In recent weeks, ICE and related federal agents have killed U.S. citizens during enforcement actions. In Minneapolis, a 37 year old American woman was killed by an ICE officer using tactics widely condemned by law enforcement experts. Two officers are now under criminal investigation for allegedly lying under oath about another shooting involving a migrant.
These are not isolated incidents. They are predictable outcomes of an enforcement system that prioritizes speed, quotas, and obedience over legality and restraint.
When officers are trained to act without understanding the law, violence becomes inevitable.
This Is Not About Immigration
It must be said plainly.
This is not about immigration policy. Reasonable people can disagree about borders, visas, and enforcement priorities.
This is about whether the federal government is allowed to train armed agents to violate the Constitution in secret.
If the government can teach one agency that warrants are optional, it can teach another. If silence is enforced through fear of termination, accountability disappears. If training is hollowed out to meet political quotas, human lives become collateral damage.
This is how democracies decay.
Not through a single decree.
But through institutional normalization of illegality.
How We Fight Back
We do not let this testimony be buried.
We do not allow Congress to treat it as routine oversight noise.
We demand immediate suspension of any training that authorizes warrantless entry.
We demand independent review of every enforcement action conducted by officers trained under this stripped down program. We demand whistleblower protections for those who speak up. And we demand that no officer be deployed without verified constitutional training.
Because when the people enforcing the law no longer know the law, the Constitution becomes a suggestion.
And once that happens, none of us are safe.
Cant say I’m shocked, but I am thoroughly disgusted. Thank you for reporting this.
None of this comes as a surprise. Their actions spoke louder than words. But thank you for putting this into print.