Blumenthal: ICE ‘Training Agents to Violate the Fourth Amendment Deliberately’

Monday on MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was “training agents to violate the Fourth Amendment deliberately and purposefully.”

Blumenthal said, “This brave whistleblower and it took a lot of guts and grit for him to come forward with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, told the truth that undercut and in fact, challenge what ICE and DHS have been telling the American people.In fact, they are training agents to violate the Fourth Amendment deliberately and purposefully. They have shrunk the training program so that ICE agents receive less training in crowd control or use of force than your police force does. But they’ve also trained agents to think they can barge into a home, break down the door without any judicial warrant.”

He added, “That’s a matter of explicit policy that they have concealed in a memo that this whistleblower told us. They purposely didn’t even give him a copy of, but told him he should train agents that they need not obtain a judicial warrant. So I think that, in fact, what we see here is an institutional, intentional effort to violate the law as a result of training agents who then go out to the streets of Minneapolis. But all across the country, California, Chicago, we have instances of ICE agents shooting people and dragging them out of cars.  It’s not accidental, accidental, or aberrant. It is a purposeful policy.”

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