They’re Training Officers to Ignore the Constitution
Secret Orders. Verbal Instructions. No Notes
They’re Training Officers to Ignore the Constitution
Secret Orders. Verbal Instructions. No Notes.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #791: Monday, February 23rd, 2026.
They always say it’s about law and order.
They always say it’s about protecting Americans.
They always say it’s about defending the Constitution.
And then former ICE attorney Ryan Schwank….someone who trained new deportation officers… steps forward and says he was pressured to give cadets guidance that undercuts the very constitutional protections they’re sworn to uphold.
In fact, Schwank is on video testifying to that, saying, “I received secretive orders to teach new cadets to violate the Constitution.”
Not in writing.
Not in official manuals.
Verbally.
Controlled.
No notes.
If that allegation is true, that is not bureaucratic sloppiness.
That is institutional corrosion.
This Is the Line
The Fourth Amendment is not complicated.
The government cannot enter your home without a judicial warrant based on probable cause.
Not because it’s polite.
Not because it’s tradition.
Because the Founders understood something that modern power always forgets:
Unchecked enforcement authority…becomes abuse.
The allegation at the center of this controversy is simple but explosive: that administrative removal paperwork…which is not a judicial warrant…was treated in practice as if it were authorization to enter homes.
And…that this shift was not openly codified.
It was communicated verbally.
If you are proud of your constitutional interpretation…you publish it.
If you believe your training respects the law…you document it.
You don’t whisper it in classrooms.
You don’t discourage notes.
You don’t create parallel instruction tracks.
That’s not how lawful systems behave.
That’s how systems protect themselves…from accountability.
This Is How Erosion Happens
Not with dramatic announcements.
Not with headlines that say “We’re ignoring the Constitution now.”
It happens quietly.
In training rooms.
In subtle reinterpretations.
In pressure to “move faster.”
In metrics that value numbers over rights.
Public posture:
We follow the law.
Private pressure:
We need results.
And when “results” start outrunning constitutional guardrails…the guardrails get… flexible.
That’s how republics decay…not in chaos…but in procedure.
Stop for a second.
If you believe enforcement agencies should be powerful, but limited…comment one word below:
Limits.
Because that’s what this is about.
Not immigration.
Not partisanship.
Limits.
And Here’s What Should Make You Angry
If cadets are being nudged into gray zones, the political appointees won’t be the ones facing civil liability later.
The officers will.
The young recruit who trusted the training.
The agent told, “This is how we do it now.”
When lawsuits come…and they will…because we’ve seen constitutional lines being crossed…it won’t be the whispering supervisors standing at the doorway.
It will be the person holding the badge.
Training people into legal ambiguity…while publicly proclaiming constitutional purity is not toughness.
It’s cowardice.
And if DHS insists none of this happened?
Fine.
Then open the books.
Release the lesson plans.
Release the memos.
Release the precise language used to instruct cadets about home entry and administrative warrants.
Transparency is the simplest way to end this debate.
Unless….transparency is the problem.
This Isn’t About Immigration
You can support deportations and still demand warrants.
You can support border enforcement and still insist that the Fourth Amendment means what it says.
This is about whether constitutional protections are firm barriers or negotiable obstacles.
Once enforcement agencies are trained to treat rights as speed bumps…instead of guardrails…you no longer have a rule-of-law system.
You have a performance system.
And performance systems always expand.
Always.
Today…it’s administrative warrants.
Tomorrow…it’s emergency authority.
Then…it’s “national security necessity.”
Then……….it’s normalized.
And…normalized power rarely contracts on its own.
The Real Danger
The danger isn’t one raid.
It isn’t one memo.
It isn’t even one administration.
The danger is institutional conditioning.
If a generation of officers is trained…even subtly….to believe that constitutional constraints are “technicalities,” that mindset does not disappear with a press release.
It embeds.
It spreads.
It becomes culture.
And culture…outlives politics.
That…is why this matters.
Because once “ends justify means” thinking enters federal training academies, the Constitution doesn’t shatter overnight.
It softens.
Quietly.
Procedurally.
Administratively.
Until one day…people look up and wonder when the line moved.
It didn’t move.
It was nudged.
In a classroom.
Verbally.
No notes.
If you believe constitutional limits apply even when enforcement is politically popular, restack this. Let it circulate inside the app.
Because power without limits is not strength.
It’s a warning.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
Democracies don’t usually fall apart with a single dramatic act — they weaken when constitutional limits start being treated as flexible. If officers were instructed, verbally and off the record, to treat administrative paperwork like a judicial warrant, that’s not a minor policy tweak. It’s a serious departure from the Fourth Amendment’s core protection: that the government cannot enter a home without judicial approval based on probable cause. When guidance can’t be documented, reviewed, or publicly defended, the risk isn’t just confusion — it’s deliberate evasion of accountability.
The greater danger is what that does over time. If enforcement culture shifts toward prioritizing speed and outcomes over constitutional safeguards, rights become obstacles instead of boundaries. That mindset spreads quietly through training, through incentives, through repetition — and it doesn’t disappear when political leadership changes. Democracies don’t erode because one rule is tested; they erode when pushing past limits becomes normalized. Once institutions learn they can bypass guardrails without consequence, the guardrails stop functioning at all.
ICE needs to be disbanded. There is no salvage for that organization. What concerns me is the officers doing the murdering are not inexperienced, but seasoned officers who have been there for years. It’s bad to the bone.