Former ICE Employee Reveals Receiving 'Secretive Orders' to Teach Cadets to Violate the Constitution

A former US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyer and legal instructor has gone public with allegations that the agency is training thousands of new officers to ignore constitutional protections, and that officials who questioned the policy were threatened with dismissal.

Ryan Schwank, an attorney hired by ICE in 2021, resigned from the agency on 13 February 2026 and delivered public testimony before Congress on 23 February, telling a bicameral forum in Washington, D.C., that ICE has slashed its officer training programme by nearly half and issued covert instructions to instruct recruits that they may enter private homes without a judicial warrant.

His testimony marks the first time an officer who served under the second Trump administration has publicly rebuked the agency from the inside. 'I am duty-bound to tell you the ICE Basic Immigration Enforcement Training Programme is now deficient, defective, and broken,' Schwank told the forum, co-hosted by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Representative Robert Garcia of California.

Schwank is represented by Whistleblower Aid, a Washington-based legal group that provides pro bono support to government whistleblowers. A spokesperson for the organisation confirmed he resigned in protest.

'Read and Return': The Secret Memo That Started It All

Schwank's most striking claim concerns his very first day as a legal instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centre outside Brunswick, Georgia. He testified that a supervisor handed him a memo dated 12 May 2025 and signed by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, one that reversed decades of agency policy by asserting that officers could forcibly enter a home using only an administrative warrant, a document signed by an ICE official rather than a judge.

What made the order alarming, Schwank said, was how it was delivered. Officers were told to read the memo in the supervisor's presence and hand it back immediately, leaving no copy.

'Never in my career have I ever received such a blatantly unlawful order — nor one conveyed in such a troubling manner,' he said in his prepared statement. 'Incredibly, I was being shown this memo in secret by my supervisor, who ensured that I understood disobedience could cost me my job.'

The memo itself, a copy of which was disclosed to Congress and described in a 21 January 2026 letter from Senator Blumenthal to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, states that the DHS Office of General Counsel had 'determined that the US Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.'

The contradiction with DHS's own 2025 legal training materials was stark: those materials described the 'physical entry of the home' without consent or a judicial warrant as 'the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed,' citing Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 US 740 (1984). 'ICE is teaching cadets to violate the Constitution,' Schwank told the forum, 'and they were attempting to cloak it in secrecy by demanding that I lie about it.'

A Training Programme Cut to the Bone

Beyond the warrantless entry directive, Schwank painted a broader picture of institutional decay inside ICE's training apparatus.

Internal documents, a July 2025 syllabus and an updated February 2026 version was disclosed to Congress by Schwank and a second, still-anonymous government whistleblower. CBS News obtained copies of these documents; taken together, they show the officer training programme was compressed from 72 days to 42 days within a seven-month window.

Analysis by Democratic staff on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that some new recruits were receiving roughly half the training hours of previous cohorts, approximately 250 fewer hours across the programme. A required-exams list from October 2025 shows cadets were tested on a fraction of the subjects previously considered mandatory.

Among the eliminated assessments were evaluations titled 'Encounters to Detention' and 'Judgment Pistol Shooting,' according to the documents. 'For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training programme,' Schwank said, 'cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour programme — classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention, and the limits of officers' authority.'

DHS Pushes Back — but Documents Tell a Different Story

The Department of Homeland Security has flatly rejected Schwank's account. 'DHS has streamlined training to cut redundancy and incorporate technology advancements, without sacrificing basic subject matter content,' a department spokesperson said in a statement issued on 23 February.

DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis went further, telling reporters: 'Despite false claims from the media and sanctuary politicians, no training hours have been cut. Our officers receive extensive firearm training, are taught de-escalation tactics, and receive Fourth and Fifth Amendment comprehensive instruction.'

Schwank rejected this framing directly when questioned during the forum. The internal syllabi, he said, tell a different story from what leadership is presenting to Congress.

Senator Blumenthal said the testimony flatly contradicts what Lyons told Congress at an earlier session, during which 'he promised that no cuts have been made to the content of officer training.' The House Judiciary Committee's Democratic Ranking Members, including Representatives Jamie Raskin and Pramila Jayapal, have sent a formal letter to Secretary Noem and Acting Director Lyons demanding the immediate rescission of the 12 May 2025 memo, arguing the text of the Fourth Amendment's protections explicitly covers 'people' — not just citizens.

'That Should Scare Everyone'

Schwank first raised concerns anonymously in January 2026, in a whistleblower complaint shared with Congress that described the warrantless-entry directive. Monday's forum was only his third public disclosure and the first time he spoke under his own name. 'Without reform, ICE will graduate thousands of new officers who do not know their constitutional duty, do not know the limits of their authority, and who do not have the training to recognise an unlawful order,' he warned the forum. 'That should scare everyone.'

In an opening statement, Senator Blumenthal drew a direct line between Schwank's testimony and the forum's wider purpose: 'We know about the Trump administration's decimation of training for immigration officers and its secret policy to shred your constitutional rights because of the brave Americans who are speaking out today.'

ICE carried out nearly 400,000 arrests in the first year of the second Trump administration, according to an internal DHS document obtained by CBS News. Less than 14% of those detained had violent criminal records; roughly 40% had no criminal record at all, beyond civil immigration violations.

The pressing issue is whether America's largest peacetime law enforcement extension is constitutionally sustainable.