Transcript of 882: Give a Little Whistle New

Immigration officials have been doing a lot of things lately that seem very hard to explain, ignoring court orders, shooting civilians. When asked why these things are happening, as we've all seen, we don't exactly get a frank and honest account from officials, where 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. 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 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. From WBEZ Chicago, It's This American Life, I'm Eric Glass. We're just going to jump right in right now with Act One.

Act One, I got the memo. Okay, so this thing just happened two weeks ago. 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 head became a whistleblower? Our producer, Nadia Raymond. Talk 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 the problem with being a lawyer, right? 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 explained to her this thing happening. And then, of course, it was out in the news two days later, right? Yeah.

What did she... Did she advise you to do something, or was she like, Here's what I think we- She just said, Follow your ethical guidelines, right?

She said, get it. She was the 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. He called the 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 this surge of thousands of new ICE agents DHS is hiring, they need people to train them in Glenco, Georgia. You interested?

To me, it seemed like a great opportunity. One, part of it was self-interested. If I'm the attorney who's in Glenco teaching, I'm not the attorney in the courtroom who's having to answer the ethical question of, Am I okay 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 would love to say otherwise.

I would love to be like, this was just 100% profile and courage type stuff, 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. This was an opportunity to go teach, which is something I've always liked doing. But then, of course, I got to Glen Co, and all of that changed the day I got there. September September first was the day I arrived in Glen Co, Georgia. I have to go back on my records, but I think it was September second 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 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 background check sufficiently to know whether or not they were going to be able to finish their program.

Are we allowed to carry a firearms? You took an agency that hires maybe a thousand people a year and told it to process 10 a thousand people in three months. There simply weren't the resources to run all the background checks ahead of time. 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, a teething pain. This is a problem. This is something they're going to solve very quickly. 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 occurred repeatedly at the academy.

And there was another issue that came up on that first day.

We were 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. 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.

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. It's the only she had said that to me. 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 like when you see a cartoon character, their feet stop and they try to break and they skid. That's what my brain did as I read this. I was like, Wait a second. And then I read it through again, more carefully the second time, and I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, says a warrant is needed to enter someone's home.

Courts have consistently said that this applies to everyone who is physically in the country, not just citizens. 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. 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 things to nitpick. 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, 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, No, 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, right? 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 is in, you're done.

You're done with the Ryan mumbled something about having to think it over.

I backpedaled a little bit and kept my answer vague. Weird enough, my supervisor was like, Do you want to go get lunch? And then we come back. And then I was like, I I used myself when I went home, and I called my wife, and I was like, Honey, I think I've 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.

You just remember, there are written training materials for the classes. 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 opposite of what the policy says. 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. The whole time I was going, I probably need to report this. I probably need to report this to somebody. For the first couple of days, I'm buying times. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do. I'm just 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. They had all been fired or reassigned. Civil rights, Civil Liberties was essentially gone. What's called the Office of the Omsbudman was essentially gone. The only thing that was left was the Office of the Inspector General for ICE.

The Office of the Inspector General, OIG.

And the rumors I saw online were that if you reported to OIG, there's a good chance that OIG would out you to your own management.

So you have nobody left to report it to, basically.

I had one group I could report it to, and that was Congress. So I remember this. I was sitting in the hotel room I was in, in a chair, looking out the window at the gas station across the street. And I was like, I don't have a choice. I have to do this. If I don't report this, nobody is going to report this, and it's going to come out years later when people have been hurt because of it. I have to report this. And so I went through. There was a process for filing a whistleblower claim with the oversight committee at the House. Back in September, I made my initial report. I just described in very brief detail what was happening. And then a couple of days later, they reached out to me to set up a call, and I started to tell them a little bit about what was happening. But I told them, I can tell you what I saw, but I can't show you proof of it. Oh, man. I don't have the memo.

So clearly, the house would have to vet Ryan's report, which can take weeks or months. And all that had to happen without Ryan getting outed to anybody at ICE. 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. Coming up, while Ryan stays at his job, He witnesses all kinds of other things in the cadet training that he finds very, very worrisome.

As somebody who wants capable ICE agents out on the street, stay with us.

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It's American Live. Nadia Raymond's story about ice whistleblower Ryan Schwenk continues.

Ryan stays and teaches at Glenco, 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. 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, reach for the right tool, apply the right rule.

Do I use verbal commands? Do I use handcuffs? Do I use physical restraints? Do I use pepper spray? Do I use taser? Do I use a baton? Do I use a gun?

Were you teaching all of that in the context of, Here's what you're legally allowed to do? That was your part of the training?

That was something I was supposed to teach, but they cut it from the curriculum. There was a class that the lawyers would teach that focused on the law behind use of force. It was part of the broader scope of classes we would teach about the officer's constitutional authority and the limitations of their authority.

Wow. When did you realize that that was cut?

When I saw the curriculum.

Ryan realized when he was comparing the new curriculum to the old one that a lot of stuff, like a comprehensive firearms exam, had been cut, while other stuff had been so compressed, he found it hard to believe it would be understandable, let alone absorbable. Like, for example, a class about the Constitution that used to be two hours, and a class on the limits to use of authority that also used to be two hours. He says they were now squeezed into one short lecture that also covered other topics, like immigration and Civil Liberties. And that's just one example of the ways the curriculum had been compressed. Total teaching hours had been cut by 40 %.

So have you ever seen a tree die from the inside? Did they rot from the inside outwards? No. So maybe you'll see this sometime. If you were going to the woods, you'll see a tree that looks completely solid on the outside. The bark is intact, the shell is intact. But if you push it, it will just snap, and you'll look inside, and the whole core is gone, right? It's just hollowed out on the inside. That's how the Training Academy was.

Meanwhile, Ryan still has to figure out how to deal with this memo. Does he teach it? So did you tell cadets, and when you were training them, that they should go into houses without a warn, or did you find a way? No.

How did you- So what I would tell cadets, I would tell cadets, this policy is out. The first and foremost, if I could avoid the subject, I would. But in the classes where it would come up, I would discuss the member like this. I would tell cadets, this policy is out there. This policy is the agency's position on it. It has not been tested in the courts. There is nothing that says you can do this, but it's the agency's position that you can. If you're going to go out and use this, you need to check with your local management, first and foremost, because that's what they told us to say. I would tell them, If you have questions, I would say, Talk to your local OPA office first.

Opa, Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, a. K. A. Your local on-call ICE attorneys.

Because I know my colleagues in OPLA, by and large, are going to tell them that this is hoodoo, that it's absolutely unlawful. I have confidence in my colleagues to say that.

Often, Ryan's job involved observing cadets during role-playing exercises. In the movie set, Fake City, part of the campus. Cadets would be given loose instructions like, Target us inside that bodega, go get him. And instructors would participate sometimes But mostly just watch and give notes.

Sometimes scenarios would go off script. Sometimes role players would change things. You would sometimes see scenarios that don't normally involve firearms, for instance, right? Turn into a firearms scenario. You see when this would happen, you would see the cadets do things that would jeopardize themselves and others, like pulling firearms at times that are inappropriate or pointing firearms at people that shouldn't be pointing them at, making arrests of individuals that had not committed a crime.

This pointed out to Ryan bad habits or instincts that they needed to teach out of the cadets. But there was so little time, and cadets started telling him that they were going to be sent to Minneapolis, which was already underway and all over the news. He kept thinking about that during the trainings.

There's this scenario where they're making an arrest outside of business. The individual is not combative or anything like that. The officers are placing them under arrest outside of business. In this particular scenario, we had enough role players that we had a few acting as observers. A few acting as people from the public doing exactly as in Minneapolis, which is coming up with their cell phone and filming with their cell phone and yelling, Hey, what are you doing? Telling the officers that they're or whatever, just like they say in Minneapolis. And this one cadet was on what they call perimeter. This one role player protester got, I guess, too close to the officer's comfort zone. I didn't think it was close enough. I don't think any of the searchers thought it was close enough, but they thought it was close enough. But they told them to back up and then immediately, I don't think they gave them time to respond, to react to the command to back up, pulled out their pepper spray. And this cadet simulated using the pepper spray to pepper spray this role player. Categorically, I don't think a single instructor there thought that it was an appropriate use.

It was not appropriate. It was not justified by the circumstances. When we asked the cadet afterwards, what happened, their explanation was that this is what they were seeing in Minneapolis, that they were doing it just like they would up there.

For Ryan, what he was seeing on the news, which was experienced officers being too aggressive too often, that made him more alarmed about what he was seeing during his own shortened trainings. What he was seeing during trainings was making him more alarmed about what he was seeing on the news. He worried his cadets weren't ready. Some cadets worried, too. Did they seem scared? Did any of them come to you and say, We don't feel prepared enough. We don't feel already?

Yes, I had cadets say that to us. I had cadets on multiple occasions say they felt unprepared for the job. I remember one cadet was talking to us about We were dealing with the issue of entry into a yard, and the cadet was having a lot of difficulty understanding how to apply that set of rules. We walked him through it a couple of times. And he was talking about about how everything the academy goes in one ear and out the other because they're rushed from one thing to the next to try to meet that schedule.

Of course, fast training can still be rigorous training as long as you test people to make sure they got it. Ryan says that in this new compressed training, crucial real-world skills were not adequately tested, like using a gun correctly or subduing somebody in the field.

Under the old academy structure, what existed before the surge, these practical exercises were graded. The students had to pass these exercises to graduate. If they didn't pass the exercise, if they demonstrated a lack of knowledge of the law or the tactics involved, they had to repeat the class. If they failed twice, they were out. They did not get to graduate.

Meaning, they wouldn't become a nice officer. But now, things were different.

So now, no matter what we saw the cadets do in these scenarios, they still graduated. We could tell a cadet up and down that they were going to get themselves killed in the field or get arrested or violate the law with what they were doing. I hope, and I believe many of you guys listened to that, but it didn't matter if they didn't. They could still graduate no matter what we saw them do.

We reached out to DHS to ask about all of this. They didn't respond. They did claim, though, in a statement in February that, No training requirements have been removed. The statement says that, Actually, the training has been beefed up from 8 hours a day to 12 hours a day. It also somehow claims that the hours are the same number of hours that recruits have always received. Dhs says they're teaching the Fourth and Fifth amendments in a way that is, Structured and comprehensive. They called it integral. When Ryan first made his report, it was about the memo. That was his main concern. But now, over five months of teaching, he'd seen so many things wrong with the training. He felt like that needed its own report. And he felt like somebody needed to be the face of that to make it as credible as possible. In January, immigration agents killed Rene Good and then Alex Prattie. That same month, Ryan started talking to Congressional staffers about going public, testifying to Congress. He was going to take some time to relocate his family, and then he'd resigned from the academy. He told his wife, his parents, and his in-laws about his plan, but not all his siblings or extended family.

Part of it was I don't want to burden them with certain things. Then also, you have to keep in mind, I was working for the Department of Homeland Security. I was working for the largest law enforcement agency in the United States. I frankly wasn't confident that I could communicate with my family over the phone without the conversations getting flagged.

Really?

I don't want to sound paranoid. I don't want to sound like, Oh, I think they're monitoring everybody. I don't know. But that's the problem is I don't know. It was just precautionary, if you will. I just wasn't willing to have certain conversations over an open line.

Ryan testified on February 23rd, not even two weeks ago as I'm recording this.

Thank you, Senator Blumenthal, Representative Garcia, members of the committee. My name is Ryan Schwank. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution when I joined ICE on August first, 2021. Look, I don't think anybody walks away from community they were a member of, the social community they were a member of lightly. I would have told you six months ago that I had strong friendships with some of the attorneys I worked with, that I had officers that I could go and have a beer with, people that were part of my life that I fully expect are never going to speak to me again.

Oh, Ryan, I didn't realize that you felt like you had lost your community.

Well, it's that. It's the combination of uncertainty going forward. I have no idea what I'm going to do next. I have a child, I have a wife. I have a family. I walked away from a well-paid, secure career doing something that I thought was good into a world where I have no job security. I have no idea what the future holds. I told my wife when I walked off the Senate floor, So the words that kept going through my head was, and now for the rest of my life. Sorry, I didn't think this conversation would make me emotional, but it does.

It's okay. Can you just have a second? Of course, of course. Take your time. We took a small break. Hello.

I wanted to say something real quick before we keep going. For the last four and a half years, this has been my life, right? But I'm the son of an immigrant. My father is a doctor Guatemala who came to the US to practice. And because he came here to practice from Guatemala, he had a fantastic life, right? He had a very successful career as a neurosurgeon. I grew up with hundreds of immigrant friends and family members. When I took this job, I gave up the tribe I had before. I lost a lot of friends over my decision to go work for ICE. And that was a hard transition, too. I know that that's one of the things that has been said about me is, Oh, he's doing this because he was like a plant in the agency or he was just a disgruntled employee. I'm not. I chose the path I took with clear eyes despite the personal cost to me when I chose it. And that was a price I was willing to pay. Why? That was the thing I was willing to do. Because I genuinely viewed it as the right thing to do it.

I cannot emphasize this enough. What's Coming down the road from what I saw at that academy is a clear and direct threat to everyone in this country. Those cadets have every intention of being good law enforcement officers, but they are are being set up to fail. They are being set up to be a danger to the rest of us. I cannot emphasize enough, not only the loss of use of force training and the firearms training, but how critically dangerous it is that we have stripped away the training on the Constitution. The law is slow. The courts are a tool for correcting things down road. The thing that keeps you safe, that keeps me safe, is those police officers buying into that myth of the avatar of justice. Look, I'm not saying this as some naive Boy Scout. I know exactly how our law enforcement operated in the '60s and '70s. I know exactly how it operates today. I'm not saying this because I believe that they're all great, wonderful people. They they are human beings with the whole range of character traits and flaws that human beings have. But that idea that they are holding up a standard is so much more powerful than we realized because it's the thing that convinces them to be lawful.

That Jiminy Cricket voice in the back of their heads that says, Hey, this isn't what an American police officer does. It's the thing that is in their head at that moment that they act.

In lots of ways, Brian's unusual, but in one important way, he's not. He sounds just as alarmed about ICE as other people inside the government have talked to. The Department of Homeland Security plans to train about 3,000 U. I. C. Officers at the academy this year.

Nadi Raymond is a producer on our show. Her story was edited by Loris Darchesky. Coming up, a judge issues some court orders, tells the government to release a bunch of people from detention. The government doesn't do it. The judge calls him in to ask why not, and what the lawyer says was not what he or anybody expected. That's in a minute, Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. This is American Life from Ira Glass. Okay, so we've named our program today after the song that Jiminy Cricket sings to Pinocchio, Give a Little Whistle. You know that one? When you get in trouble and you don't know right from wrong. Give a little whistle. We have two stories today where lawyers from inside the government give us rare and factual accounts of what is really happening inside ICE with fascinating details of a broken, chaotic mess. We have arrived at Act 2 of our program, Act 2, Don't Trust the Process. This next glimpse inside the World of Ice comes from a transcript of a court hearing that happened last month. In it, this government attorney got increasingly beaten down by the facts, and by the end, really opened up about what it's like to do her job right now.

You do not hear government lawyers talking in court the way she did in this hearing. She's very candid, very unguarded, very personal. The reason for the hearing in the first place was notable. Basically, there's been an explosion of what are called habeas petitions in immigration cases. A habeas petition is sending to the government, show why this person is being detained. Otherwise, you have to let them go. This is a bedrock legal principle that's been around since the Middle Ages to keep people from being locked up without any reason. It's in the first article of the US Constitution. Propublica has been tracking the numbers in immigration cases. Before President Trump came back into office, there were like 20 or 30 immigration habeas petitions being filed every week. In February, it was over 2,000 every week, which has completely overwhelmed the federal courts. So the judge in this case had rolled in a bunch of these habeas cases These people have been illegally detained. You got to release them immediately. And then it didn't happen. David Kestenbaum has our story.

This all happened 1: 00 on a Tuesday afternoon at a federal courtroom in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There are just a handful of people there. The judge, Judge Jerry Blackwell, ordered the hearing because he was trying to figure out what on earth was going on with the government's lawyers. We got an actor to read the transcript here for you. It's been lightly edited, but just for clarity and length.

Judge Blackwell. Good afternoon. You may be seated. The hearing this afternoon concerns compliance with court orders, not policy, just compliance. Nothing else. I've had so many issues with non-compliance in just this past week that I called for this hearing.

The judge's issue is with five different immigration cases. The court had ruled that the people the government had detained had to be released because the government had no reason to hold them. But then the government was not releasing them or even giving updates, hence this hearing. You know how in some TV shows or movies, there's this moment where someone will give this speech? It's good, but you're like, people don't actually do that in real life. Well, sometimes they do. It's like Judge Blackwell knew exactly what he wanted to say, and it all came out.

As I hope everybody here agrees and acknowledges that a court order is not advisory, and it is not conditional. It is not something that any agency can treat as optional. The authority exercised by the court is derived from Article 3 of the Constitution. That authority under Article 3 only has meaning if the court orders are obeyed, adhered to promptly, fully, and in good faith.

The whole judicial system depends on the executive branch doing what the court say, more or less voluntarily. He doesn't have a great way to force them to do it. The judge says, If you don't comply with the court's orders, you've essentially painted the court into a corner. Because what are we supposed to do?

Detention without lawful authority is not just a technical defect. It is a constitutional injury that unfairly falls on the heads of those who have done nothing wrong to justify it. The overwhelming majority of the hundreds seen by this court been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country. They live in their communities. Some are separated from their families. When a release order is not followed, the result is not just a delay. In some instances, it is the continued detention of a person the Constitution does not permit the government to hold and who should have been left alone, that is, not arrested in the first place.

I can't tell how long timewise this goes on for because we just have the transcript, but it's like five pages. He says the court has been having a hard time even getting information about when these people would be released.

In many instances, I have had to not just issue an order, but another order, another order, another order. About seven or eight different touches sent to the government, simply asking for the date, time, and location of the release of someone who was ordered released. In many instances, a week or more in the past. Why is that so difficult? I cannot understand because there's obviously a person associated with the government who is going to the detainee to release him or her. You have their name. You can carry with you a form. The name is on it. Just write the time on it and send it to the DOJ.

Judge Blackwell says to the government lawyers, There's no excuse to say that you don't have the staff to deal with this huge influx of habeas cases. Because it was the government that decided to do all these immigration rates with apparently no plan for how to deal with them in the court system.

I'm going to stop there just by way of background and follow up on the responses I received from Ms. Lee and from Ms. Voss. If you want to come up to the podium, Ms. Lee.

Ms. Lee is Julie Lee, an attorney for ICE.

Ms. Lee, Your Honor, may I approach? Judge Blackwell, you have approached already.

She presents some documents to the judge and starts talking.

Ms. Lee, Just to have some background, I was put on this special mission to help with the US attorney office with all the habeas claims that they have received. They are overwhelmed and they need help, so I have to say stupidly enough to volunteer. In January fifth, when I started with the agency, I have to be honest, we have no guidance or direction on what we need to do. When you showed up, they just throw you in the well, and then here we go.

She explains that it's been a mess. Like she has two different government email accounts now but could only access one. Some of the court's orders were going to the other email that she couldn't access. She's spending hours and hours just not even doing the job, just trying to figure out how to do the job.

Judge Blackwell. So are you telling the court that you were brought in brand new, a shiny brand new penny into this role, and you received no proper orientation or training on what you were supposed to do? Ms. Lee, I have to say yes to that question, your honor. Judge Blackwell, I'd like to hear about the Oscar case, Oscar 26167.

The Oscar case is the main one discussed in the transcript. The details of it are particularly troubling to the judge. Oscar is apprehended on January 10th in Minneapolis, where he lives. Five days later, on the 15th, the court ordered him to be immediately released. But by then, this is very common, Oscar had been flown all the way from Minnesota to a detention facility in Texas. The judge, when ordering his immediate release on the 15th, required an update to be filed within 48 hours.

Judge Blackwell, there was no 48-hour update that was filed on the 17th. That hadn't happened. And so then the court is saying that I wanted a letter no later than 3: 00 PM on the 19th showing cause why you shouldn't be held in contempt for violating the court's order. Then on the 19th, I'm told the petitioner was scheduled for return to Minnesota on a flight from El Paso on Tuesday, January 20th, and that he would be released upon his return.

Petitioner here just means Oscar.

That was on the 19th of January. Then we learned that on the 20th, when the release was supposed to have taken place, there was no release. Instead, we're told that Council for Ice had represented to petitioner's counsel that the petitioner was currently on his route stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, not El Paso, Texas, and is scheduled to arrive in Saint Paul on Saturday, the 24th. This is already then nine days after this person has been ordered, released, and found to have been unlawfully detained in the first place. So nine days later, he's still in custody, now being flown around from El Paso to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

At this point, a lawyer for Oscar, the man who is still somehow being held, filed a motion for contemptive court.

Judge Blackwell. I ordered then Ms. Voss to file a written response.

Ms. Voss is Anna Voss, a senior lawyer representing the federal government here. She's in the courtroom listening to all of this.

I'm sure she's had more than one day where she regrets how well I know her name since most things end in, get a hold of Ms. Voss. Ms. Voss responded on the 22nd explaining the timing of when she learned the facts. Let me pause there to make another point clear enough. I wholeheartedly embrace the notion of a unitary executive, as in DHS, ICE, the DOJ, all a part of the executive branch. If there's a problem in the restaurant, I don't intend to go in the kitchen to try to figure out who makes the bread. All of it is part of the executive branch. It is not an excuse to tell me you contacted ICE because ICE is also part of the unitary executive for accountability purposes.

After Ms. Voss's response, more days pass with the man, Oscar, still in detention, and the judge, not getting updates. Apparently, in some of the filings back and forth, the government had said that the delay in releasing this man, Oscar, had something to do with safety concerns. The judge had asked, What were the safety concerns? Three times. In court, after a while, he finally got an answer.

Ms. Lee. The reason that I did ask, and I was told if we provided all information, the protesters would show up at the airport and the agent and other people will be endangered. So I took it to heart because during that time, it was very heated here in Minnesota with all the protests that was going on. Any public thing that was going on is at risk, even myself, also at risk for putting my name and myself in here, Your Honor. That's the safety concern that I have. Judge Blackwell. Is your answer because they were concerned concerned that if he were put on a plane, that if he arrived here, there may have been a public reaction of some kind? Ms. Lee. Your Honor, he was escorted with other agents. He wasn't put on the plane by himself. The original plan was to have agent escorted him back, and with the protests was going on during that time, I was advised to be careful of what information to put out in public for the safety of others. Judge Blackwell. When the various persons are detained and then flown to El Paso or New Mexico, do Do you know that they are flown out of Minnesota sometimes within hours, if not the next day of being detained?

Ms. Lee. Yes, I know that they are doing that. Judge Blackwell. Do you feel there's anything wrong with taking hours or days to fly them out of Minnesota when they've been Ms. Lee. Oh, yeah, definitely. Judge Blackwell, just a minute. Let me finish my question. To fly them out of Minnesota and then take 13 days to return them when they've been found to have been unlawfully detained? Ms. Lee. Your Honor, I did ask the same question, too. I have not got the answer.

If there is a person who can answer that question or explain or defend the government's actions, it does not seem like they're in this courtroom. Judge Blackwell and Julie Lee, who's supposed to be representing the government, they agree this is a problem. The judge is saying, This looks bad from the outside, and Julie Lee is like, Looks bad on the inside. And here, the whole thing goes off the rails a bit. Julie Lee confesses to the judge that at one point She put in her resignation, but the government couldn't find a replacement. She said she was just going to walk out. But then she got another person released, a kid, someone under 18.

Ms. Lee, that like a step, like a barrier Like, Wait, Julie, stop. You need to go back and get more people out. That's why I'm still here, because if I walk out... Sometimes I wish you would just hold me in contempt, Your Honor, so that I can have a full 24 hours of sleep. I days and night just because people still in there. And yes, procedure in place right now sucks. I'm trying to fix it. As you can see, the email that I sent to you, it has been improving, a great improvement. And last night, I had to stay up until 2: 35 AM just to get these documents ready for you. I can't say it's a waste of my time, but I could have sent so many more emails and get so many more people ready to be released. And I am here with you, your honor. What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks. And I am trying every breath that I have so that I can get you what you need.

The judge asks Lee if she is expressing this frustration to other people at ICE or DOJ. Yes, she says. I write emails in 24-point font. Bold. I threaten that I will put their names on the court documents. Judge Blackwell tells Lee he doesn't want to threaten her or anyone. He just wants this fixed.

Judge Blackwell, what we really want is simply compliance, because on the other side of this is somebody who should not have been arrested in some instances in the first place, who is being held in jail or put in shackles for days, if not a week plus after they've been ordered, released. That's my concern, upholding the rule of law and the constitutional rights of all concerned. I hear the concerns about all the energy that this is causing the DOJ to expend, but with respect, some of it is of your own making by not complying with orders. Do you understand that? Ms. Lee, I do, and I share the same concern with you, Your Honor. I am not white, as you can see, and my family is at risk as any other people that might get picked up, too. So I share the same concern. Our email just never stops. As you can see, I would love to undo all of this stuff because no one wants to be in jail. Actually, honestly, being in jail a day to catch up with sleep is not bad right now with all the hours I have to put into this job.

Judge Blackwell, Ms. Lee, I appreciate your candor.

That's basically where the transcript ends. What to make of all this? You could say this is a document about the chaos this moment and how the legal process is not working. The judge had to call this hearing after all. But he did call it, and we have the record of it. In reading it, I kept thinking about Oscar, because while all this was unfolding, all those days Judge Blackwell and Julie Lee were talking about and going back and forth about, those were all days in his life. Days when, as the judge says, he should not have been detained in the first place. What happened for At the end of the hearing, his attorney urges the judge to please read docket entry number 67, which actually answers all these questions. It's worth hearing, so here. We've edited this for length and clarity. Each paragraph is numbered. That's the way things are written.

Declaration of O. I, O, declare the following is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge and recollection. One, my name is O. I am a 20-year-old man Guatemala. I have lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota for about four years. I have pending asylum and special immigration juvenile status applications. Two, I am filing this declaration under my first initial rather than my full name due to fear of retaliation against my family or me for opposing the federal government. My full name is known to plaintiff's counsel. Three. On Saturday, January 10th, 2026, I went to work and then got lunch with my father and my cousin. We drove back to my work together after that. On the way back, a car passed me quickly, sped up, and stopped in the middle of the street. A few men got out of the car in front of us and ran towards us. I turned off the car. The men told me if I didn't get out of the car, that they would force me out. I got out of the car. They told me I was under arrest but didn't say why. They handcuffed me. I left my keys and phone in the car.

I felt like I was being kidnapped. Four. They took us to the same place, the Whipple building, where the immigration court is located. Five. In the garage, ICE agents checked our belongings and IDs, and then they took us inside and put us in a cell where we waited to be processed. The cell was small but was already holding about 40 people. We were there close to 20 hours in that cell. It was really hot and dirty. There was food scattered on the floor. The floor was sticky with mud, and everything stuck to your shoes. I was so tired. There was one toilet, but there was no privacy. I worried about viruses and bacteria since there were so many of us in the cramped space. We were only given food two times in that almost 20 hours, both times a sandwich, an apple, and a cookie. I tried to sleep, but there was no space to sit down. When some people got up from the floor, I would sit down, but it was painful to be on the cement floor. Six. On Sunday, January 11th, after breakfast, an ICE officer came and got me. He took my fingerprints.

I was finally allowed to make one call, one call, no time limit. I wanted to call my attorney, Kim Boche, but I didn't have her number. The ICE officer said I was being moved to Texas as soon as possible, and I will face a judge in Texas. Seven. Around 11: 00 AM on January 11th, an officer gathered everyone in the cell, chained our hands and feet, and we were put in trucks. Ice took us to the airport. There were around 120 detainees on the plane. Eight. I remained in chains the whole plane ride. I was very hungry. No food or water were offered for a while. I was finally given a snack and water on the plane about 12 hours since I had last eaten and had to eat with handcuffs on. Nine. I arrived in El Paso, Texas, around 6: 00 or 07: 00 PM on January 11th. When I arrived at the El Paso, Texas, facility, I was given a small bag with two thin blankets, a towel, two T-shirts, and a pair of boxers. Ten. I was told by the security official at the prison that the place I was brought to in Texas was supposed to be temporary, but I spent 10 days there.

Twelve. There were about 72 of us in the cell. The cell was the size of a small gym where they fit about 40 bunk beds. There were only two flip phones for all the detainees in this center to use. Over the 10 days I was in El Paso, the officers probably brought the phones into the cell for our use 2-3 times for 2 hours each. We would get together and beg the officer to let us call our family or our attorneys. If we could get the phone, we could only use it for two minutes. You had to be ready when it was your turn. If you didn't have an attorney's number memorized, you couldn't call them. There were signs everywhere in the detention facility offering us $3,000 each if we agreed to self-deport. The officers I would frequently try to get people to sign forms agreeing to self-deport. Fifteen. After five or six days, I'm not sure exactly, I was finally allowed to make a two-minute phone call. I was able to obtain my lawyer's phone number from my dad, who I saw through the window in a different room. I asked a security guard to ask the other security guard to get my lawyer's phone number from my dad.

I was finally able to talk to my attorney, Kimboche, for one minute only. She said she was trying to arrange a call with me. The security guard started yelling at me that my time was up, so I couldn't understand much. I don't remember much of the phone call. I was so nervous. Sixteen. On Saturday, the 17th, I talked to my attorney, and she told me I was supposed to be released the next day or the day after that. She told me a judge had ordered my release. I also received two letters and a list with phone numbers in the mail from one of my teachers. She also sent snacks, clothes, and a notebook, but I wasn't allowed to have any of this, only the papers and letters. Eighteen. Ice did not tell me that my attorney had been trying to call me and contact me while I was in Texas. They didn't tell me my attorney had retained another attorney to file a habeas petition on my behalf or that a court had granted it and ordered my release. They just kept holding me there and occasionally trying to get me to self-deport. 19. I was in detention in El Paso, Texas for about 10 days.

On what I think was the 10th day, I was moved. A transportation officer asked those of us in the cell if we had eaten, and when some people said they hadn't, he told them to shut up. 20. I was moved to a detention center in Torrance, New Mexico. The bus ride to Torrance was scary. The bus swerved a lot because the driver was falling asleep. I thought we would die for sure, and I wouldn't be able to do anything because I was chained. After I arrived in Torrance, I had to wait for about 12 hours to be processed. They took our temperature, blood pressure, weight, and height, and I think gave us some type of vaccine against measles. Then I was moved to a room with about 50 other people. The food there was awful. It looked like dog food. I stayed at Torrance for six days. Twenty-two. In Torrance, I was able to message and video call with my family, lawyer, and friends. I was only able to do this because teachers at my school had pulled money and put in account. You needed to pay to use the tablet. On Sunday, the 25th, after dinner, I was moved to a single cell.

It was small and cold. I couldn't sleep because it was so cold and because the guard had the TV on all night. 24. On Monday, January 26, I got breakfast around 4: 30 AM. Around 10: 00 AM, I was told we were going to Cebola Jail. Nobody explained why. I was handcuffed and loaded into a car and taken to Cebola Jail in Mexico. 25. This Cebola Jail was horrible. It was cramped. I was chained up again. The officers mocked me and called me their enemy. They laughed at me. I wasn't given an explanation for why I was there. Twenty-six. Security guards then put me on a bus. I think it was around January 27th. I was handcuffed. It was freezing cold in the bus because the driver had the AC on. We had no jacket. It's the bus. The bus eventually took me back to El Paso in the early morning of Tuesday, January 27th. Twenty-seven. I was put in a cold cell where I had to sleep on the bare cement floor. One officer told me that I had no chance of returning to Minnesota, and that the best thing for me is self-deportation.

She told me that if I fought my case, I would spend 2-3 more months here in El Paso. She offered me $2,600 to self-deport. I refused. They didn't tell me the judge had already ordered my release and returned to Minnesota. If I hadn't managed to talk to my attorney who told me a while back that I was ordered released, I might have given up at this point and signed the self-deportation forms because the conditions were so unbearable. 28. I was taken to a doctor to check my temperature and blood pressure. I waited at the doctor's office until around 1: 30 PM, and then suddenly an ICE officer came and shouted my name. She told me I might be free, but don't get too excited. They took me to the airport. 29. We arrived at the airport too late and missed the plane. 30. When I was taken back to the detention center from When I arrived in the airport after missing the flight, I overheard an ICE officer saying in English, The judge in Minnesota wants this one back. 31. At around midnight, they took me to another police processing station 10 to 15 minutes away.

At 05: 00 AM, they took us to the airport. I was flown to Denver and then to Minneapolis. 32. When I arrived in Minneapolis, I was handed off to ICE agents, handcuffed, and put in jail at the same place where it all started with the same dirty floors. I asked for a phone call. I called my attorney but got no answer. I then called my teacher, and while I was speaking to her, I was told that I was being released. My teacher came to pick me up. I had to sign lots of papers that I wasn't going to be a part of any groups. I didn't know what they meant by groups. They never told me why I was detained. Thirty-five. Right now, I am happy that I have been released. I am grateful I have my family and an attorney. When I think of my time in detention, I think of so many ways I could have died there. The way my car was stopped in the middle of the road, the diseases I could have caught at the Whipple, the driver who was falling asleep at the wheel driving us from El Paso to New Mexico.

I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.

In the end, Oscar was detained for 18 days.

David Kestenbaum is the senior editor of our show. Julie Lee, the ICE attorney in the transcript, has since been reassigned. The Declaration of O was read Marquise Rodriguez. Rich Summer, read the court transcript. We reached out to the Department of Justice for Comment, got the following statement that reads in part, If rogue judges followed the law in adjudicating cases and respected the government's obligation to properly prepare cases, there wouldn't be an overwhelming habeas caseload or concern over DHS following orders.

How can you say there's only one way up when you know there's a million ways down. Some folks have fallen out of this trying to get up. I know I'm just staying around.

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