Ryan Schwenk

Like, why were you deciding to still stay at that point?

If not me, then who?

If I left, it would not change what they do.

It would not change how things were done.

I had this conversation with myself and with my wife and with others.

If I left, who was going to replace me?

And the answer was going to be someone who had no frame of reference for the way things should look.

So Ryan stays and teaches at Glencoe, Georgia, at the Ice Academy there.

It's at a training campus by the beach.

It has things like a mat room, literally a room full of mats to practice tackling someone down.

It has a fake town, like a movie set, to practice arrests.

Classrooms, a cafeteria, shooting ranges.

Ryan says it was strange to be right by the ocean, next to towns that are vacation destinations, and still hear gunshots all day long.

Ryan started teaching after immigration agents had spent the summer blanketing Los Angeles, but before the big surges in Chicago and Minneapolis.

He says his team was told that about 3,000 cadets who had no prior law enforcement experience were coming to the campus in Georgia, and his job was to help turn them into new ICE agents.

DHS wanted them to graduate by Christmas.

So Ryan is looking at the curriculum, and he's trying to figure out how to teach these cadets and teach them fast.

Rules around the use of force, basic immigration law, how to react when someone's running away.

All this stuff has to be so ingrained in these cadets that they don't even think about it when they're out on the field.

They just do the right thing instinctively.