A brave former leader at ICE, Ryan Schwank, quit his job and spoke out about a serious problem in the training for immigration officers under Donald Trump. He called the training program “deficient, defective, and broken.”
Schwank told lawmakers that when he joined ICE in 2021, he promised to follow the Constitution.
He worked there for four and a half years, helping officers, and then left in early 2026 to share what he saw. He said he watched ICE cut down the training program over the last five months.
According to Schwank and documents from Senate Democrats, ICE reduced the training from 584 hours to just 336 hours.
That’s a big drop — about 40% less. Important classes like immigration law, legal rights, training on using force, integrity, victim-centered methods, and even exams like shooting and determining if someone can be removed were removed.
This is very concerning.
Under Trump, ICE hired over 12,000 new officers, and they’re getting trained in just 42 days instead of 72. Schwank says many new officers don’t understand the laws or tactics they need to do their jobs.
He also said that ICE leaders wanted him to lie about what was happening.
“They were trying to keep it secret by making me lie,” he said. He warned that poor training could lead to deaths.
We know that ICE agents have killed at least three American citizens in the last year.
Tensions are rising as more officers go into big cities. And now it seems that the rules — like constitutional rights, de-escalation, and authority limits — might be ignored just to move faster.
The Department of Homeland Security claims that the main parts of training are still there.
But the training materials show otherwise.
As ICE rushes to hire more officers, a former worker is raising the alarm: if training is weakened, so is responsibility.
Schwank ended by asking others inside the system to speak up, because when training disappears, it’s not only rules that go away — it’s protections for everyone.
About the Author
