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,' Schwanktold the forum, co-hosted by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Representative Robert Garcia of California.
Schwank is represented byWhistleblower Aid, a Washington-based legal group that provides pro bono support to government whistleblowers. A spokesperson for the organisation confirmed he resigned in protest.
Schwank's most striking claim concerns his very first day as a legal instructor at theFederal Law Enforcement Training Centreoutside 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,' hesaid 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,' citingWelsh 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.'
Beyond the warrantless entry directive, Schwank painted a broader picture of institutional decay inside ICE's training apparatus.
Source: International Business Times UK
