The Los Angeles Times reports:

Earlier this month, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testified to Congress that while the agency had reduced the number of training days to 42 from 75, “We went from five days a week to six days a week. Five days a week was five eight-hour days and we’ve gone to six 12-hour days.”

But the documents appear to contradict Lyons’ testimony.

“The schedules reflected on these documents indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” according to a 90-page memorandum from minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Blumenthal is the top Democrat on that committee.

Blumenthal’s office also disclosed the identity of one whistleblower: Ryan Schwank, an attorney who most recently served as an instructor for new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits at the ICE Academy within the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia.

Schwank, who resigned Feb. 13, is one of two whistleblowers who made a confidential disclosure to Blumenthal’s office last month regarding an ICE policy allowing agents to forcefully enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant.

In his testimony Monday, Schwank said that for the last five months, he watched ICE leadership dismantle its training program. What remains, he said, is a “dangerous husk.”

Schwank said the assertion by Homeland Security leaders that cadets receive the same training in a shorter time frame “is a lie.”

“This means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable, the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force,” he said. “Our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well they can make split-second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life-or-death situations. Yet in the name of churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests that we need to know if cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job.”

Schwank said he was shown the secret memo authorizing forceful home entry on his first day as a training instructor. He was told to teach its contents but not to take notes on it or discuss its existence.

“Never in my career had I ever received such a blatant unlawful order, nor one conveyed in such a troubling manner,” he said. “Incredibly, I was being shown this memo in secret by my supervisor, who made sure that I understood that disobedience would cost me my job.” [Continue reading…]