Chapter 1: What alarming practices are being reported by ICE lawyers?
Immigration officials have been doing a lot of things lately that seem very hard to explain, ignoring court orders, shooting civilians. I want to ask why these things are happening. As we've all seen, we don't exactly get a frank and honest account from officials, but we get our talking points, many of which don't turn out to be true.
But recently, refreshingly, two different lawyers who work for ICE stepped forward separately and lifted the curtain to reveal all kinds of details about what is really happening right now inside our immigration system. And I know there have been a couple of quotes from each of these people in the news, but I have to say, when you dive into the details of everything that they witnessed...
It's satisfying in this way that I really didn't even know I craved, because they're not talking about, like, this or that specific incident, but about the entire system being broken, and they lay it out. Today on our show, what we're going to do is we're going to bring you their stories, and I think you'll see what I mean. I'm WBZ Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.
And we're just going to jump right in right now with Act One. Act One, I Got the Memo. OK, so this thing just happened two weeks ago that this lawyer from ICE walked into a room full of congresspeople and gave testimony that basically just blew up his entire life, like everything he'd worked towards for years. What was so extreme?
They decided to stop training ICE agents and stop lawyering for ICE agents and instead became a whistleblower.
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Chapter 2: What led Ryan Schwank to become a whistleblower?
Our producer, Nadia Raymond, talked to him.
This whistleblower, Ryan Schwenk, will tell you proudly that he's a public servant. Doesn't make policy and doesn't want to, thanks very much. Not that he always agrees, but he's fine executing whatever the people in charge want to do, as long as it's legal. He started working for the government under President Biden.
He'd been representing immigrants, but now he was representing ICE in the Department of Homeland Security, prosecuting immigration cases. The way he saw it, he was fulfilling the same purpose in both roles, ensuring procedural fairness. Due process, making sure the system worked the same for everyone and worked smoothly.
It bugged him if things got mucky or slow, like when the Biden administration was dragging its feet on immigration cases. But then, last May, under the Trump administration, all ICE lawyers got instructions that Ryan found alarming.
They were told to ask for their cases to be dismissed when they went to court, which allowed ICE agents to arrest immigrants right there and then, often as soon as they walked out the door. Ryan was like, how could people have due process if there's no time to make their case and then they're getting immediately arrested?
He wasn't sure what to do, but he's such a rule follower that he didn't tell anyone about these new instructions. Not even his wife. That's kind of the problem with being a lawyer, right?
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Chapter 3: How are ICE training protocols changing under pressure?
I can talk to her about generalities. I can't talk to her about specific policies. Oh, so you were just like, I'm generally feeling this? Kind of, yeah. I try to be very careful with what I would say to not give away agency practices, but... I kind of explained to her like, you know, this, this kind of thing happening. And then of course it was out in the news like two days later.
What did she, did she advise you to do something where she like, here's what I think we just said, follow, follow your ethical guidelines. Right. She said, you know, get it. She was one actually, I think suggested calling the bar association. So that's what I did. She's like, you know, you should call that hotline. I know they have one. So he did.
Chapter 4: What issues are arising from the rapid hiring of new ICE agents?
He called a state bar association, and they said, yep, that's not ethical. He talked to his boss. His boss said, okay, I get it. You don't have to do these. I'll do them. But Ryan figured that he could only dodge these for so long. So he started to wonder what was next for him.
Then one day, his supervisor told him, you know, with the surge of thousands of new ICE agents DHS is hiring, they need people to train them in Glencoe, Georgia. You interested? And to me, it seemed like a great opportunity. One, part of it was self-interested.
Like, if I'm the attorney who's in Glencoe teaching, I'm not the attorney in the courtroom who's having to answer the ethical question of, am I OK prosecuting this case? You were just like, not it. I'm going to dodge and go do this other thing so that I don't get. I mean, I would love to say otherwise.
Chapter 5: What problems did Ryan observe during cadet training?
I would love to be like, this was just like 100% like profile encouraged type stuff, right? But it's not. It's a combination of I could see the writing on the wall and I saw the opportunity to do good, right? This was an opportunity to go teach, which is something I've always liked doing. But then, of course, I got to Glencoe and all of that changed the day I got there.
September 1st was the day I arrived in Glencoe, Georgia. I have to go back with my records, but I think it was September 2nd was the first morning that I went to the academy. I showed up early in the morning and I had to go through and get my badge. And then I went to the academy training building. And while I was there,
The very first thing I heard was a conversation about background checks on cadets and how they weren't being completed before they came to the academy and that we already had problems with cadets showing up that had disqualifying criminal offenses and the concerns that we were going to have cadets coming through that we couldn't...
We couldn't background check sufficiently to know whether or not they were going to be able to finish the program, right? Are we allowed to carry a firearm? You took an agency that hires maybe 1,000 people a year and told it to process 10,000 people in three months. There simply weren't the resources to run all the background checks ahead of time.
Chapter 6: How is the legal process being affected by immigration court orders?
They were just delayed. They were backlogged. They had people showing up to the academy who had not completed background checks. And my first response to hearing this thing about the background checks was, wow, that's a growth, like a teething pain, right? Like, this is a problem. This is something they're going to solve very quickly, right? This was a mistake because we just started.
We just started this big process. This was clearly an administrative error, and they're going to fix it. As we later found out, it was an issue that recurred repeatedly at the academy. And there was another issue that came up on that first day. We're in this big conference room, and my supervisor and I are in there. I think there are a couple other people in the room. I couldn't name who exactly.
But she shows me the memos, or my supervisor shows me these memos, and I'm told, you can read it, but you're not allowed to keep a copy of it, and you're not allowed to take notes on it.
Chapter 7: What challenges are faced by government attorneys in immigration cases?
What did you make of that? I had never received an order like that ever in my career at any time. It was bizarre to me, and it was a massive red flag the moment she said that to me, before I even read the memo. To me, it was a massive red flag before I read the first word on the page. Then he read the memo. It was issued by Todd Lyons, the acting director for ICE.
that instructed ICE officers that they could enter into a person's home without a judicial warrant. In other words, instead of ICE agents getting permission from a judge to go into someone's home, they would only need to get approval from ICE using a form called I-205. It's funny, when I first read it, it was so innocuous sounding. that at first I didn't think there was anything wrong with it.
I read through it and was like, oh, okay. So we're going to use I-205s to go into houses. Okay. And then it was kind of like when you see like a cartoon character, like their feet stop and they try to break and they kind of like skid, right? Kind of what my brain did as I read this, I was like, wait a second.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of the judge's orders on ICE's operations?
And then I read it through again, more carefully the second time. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says a warrant is needed to enter someone's home. And courts have consistently said that this applies to everyone who is physically in the country, not just citizens. So Ryan saw this new policy, and he thought... Oh, no. Oh, no.
I was by no means at the time an expert on the Fourth Amendment, right? Obviously, I know the Fourth Amendment because I'm an attorney, but it's not like I'm a constitutional scholar on the thing looking for, like... Things to nitpick, right? I'm a lawyer who knows the Fourth Amendment the way most lawyers know the Fourth Amendment as a thing that you learned about and apply in generalities.
And even at that level, looking at this, I was like, this, this is wrong. And my instructor, my supervisor was clear, like, if you're not comfortable teaching this, just tell us. Ryan says his boss also casually brought up that the person who worked here before him had expressed concerns about it, said they felt strongly enough about these concerns to resign. And now they don't work here anymore.
Like saying, nice job you got there. Would be a shame if something happened to it. I don't think I was told the story by accident. I was told all this before I was shown the memo. So it was very clear to me that I was being told all of this and then shown the memo so that I understood I either teach this or I lose my job.
You're going out the door and you're going home and not home to work back in Indianapolis. You're going home as in you're done. You're done with the agency. Ryan mumbled something about having to think it over. I kind of like backpedaled a little bit. And kind of like kept my answer vague. Weirdly enough, like my supervisor was like, do you want to go get lunch?
And then we come back and then I was like, I excused myself when I went home and I called my wife and I was like, honey, I think I've kind of walked into a bear trap here. And within this bear trap, another bear trap. Ryan had also been told, when you teach this, don't write anything down. Deliver the information verbally, no paper trail.
So he checked the existing curriculum to see what it said about using warrants to enter people's homes. Remember, there are written training materials for the classes. And in the training materials, it says an I-205 admin warrant is not a search warrant. You may not use it to enter into a protected or private area. So the training documents say the exact opposite of what the policy says.
And I was told that we were not going to change that, that we were not to put it in writing, that we trained them differently. And the whole time I was going, I probably need to report this. I probably need to report this to somebody. So for the first couple of days, I'm like buying time. So I try to figure out what I want to do.
Like I'm just kind of staying in the background, trying to stand on the radar. I start looking into our internal avenues for reporting things. And what I found was that they had all either been compromised or destroyed. Like, they had all been fired or reassigned. Civil rights, civil liberties was essentially gone. What's called the Office of the Arms Budman was essentially gone.
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