ICE Chief Lied to Congress About Training, Whistleblowers Say
A whistleblower report revealed Monday that ICE has been cutting corners on essential training for federal agents—despite what ICE chief Todd Lyons told Congress earlier this month. In a lengthy memo produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, whistleblower documents indicated that new recruits were receiving significantly less training amid a surge in hiring, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday. The schedules included in the whistleblower documents “indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” the memo stated.Earlier this month, Lyons claimed that while ICE had reduced the number of training days from 75 to 42, the organization had adjusted the schedule in order to preserve the amount of training. “Five days a week was five eight-hour days. We’ve gone to six 12-hour days,” he said.Whistleblower documents included in the memo indicated that ICE had also made sweeping changes to its training syllabus and testing requirements for cadets. A syllabus from this month compared to one from before the agency’s hiring surge indicated that ICE has cut entire modules, including force simulation training, government structure, criminal versus removal proceedings, and use of force. The standards for testing have also been significantly reduced. ICE recruits previously needed to pass 25 practical exams in order to graduate, and now they only need to pass nine. Among the more than a dozen exams that have been eliminated were tests on “Criminal Encounters,” “Judgment pistol shooting,” and “Determine removability.”“All of these are now instead evaluated, if at all, mainly by open-book, multiple-choice written exams and without any graded practical examinations,” the memo stated.These changes have come as Americans have witnessed ICE agents across the country practice excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, and wrongful detentions. A new report Monday revealed that an ICE agent in Minnesota had accidentally discharged his weapon in a hotel room—nearly killing the person in the room next door. The memo was released ahead of another congressional hearing about ICE’s apparent abuses. Speaking at the hearing Monday was Ryan Schwank, an attorney who served as an instructor for new ICE recruits in Georgia. He claimed that ICE had cut firearms training, as well as legal classes on the constitutional limits of ICE’s authority and protesters’ rights.Schwank previously tipped off Senator Richard Blumenthal’s office about ICE giving itself permission to forgo a judicial warrant in order to enter people’s homes. It was unclear whether he was the whistleblower behind the documents included in the newest report.