882: Give a Little Whistle
This American Life
This American Life
4.5 • 91.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
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Summary
Two lawyers who work for ICE step forward and lift the curtain on what is really happening inside our immigration system right now.
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- Prologue: Two lawyers dive into the details of what they’ve witnessed behind the scenes in different parts of the immigration system. (2 minutes)
- Act One: Former ICE attorney Ryan Schwank explains the chaos and dysfunction he observed at an ICE training academy, which led him to whistleblow to Congress two weeks ago. (12 minutes)
- Act Two: A federal judge orders the government to immediately release a bunch of people from detention. Days pass, and the government doesn’t comply. So the judge calls a hearing to figure out what’s going on. The lawyer's response is not what he or anybody expected. (25 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Immigration officials have been doing a lot of things lately that seem very hard to explain, |
| 0:05.6 | ignoring court orders, shooting civilians. And when I ask why these things are happening, |
| 0:11.3 | as we've all seen, we don't exactly get a frank and honest account from officials, |
| 0:16.2 | but we get our talking points, many of which don't turn out to be true. But recently, refreshingly, two different |
| 0:24.5 | lawyers who work for ICE step forward separately and lifted the curtain to reveal all kinds of |
| 0:30.8 | details about what is really happening right now inside our immigration system. And I know there |
| 0:36.3 | have been a couple of quotes from each of these people in the |
| 0:37.9 | news, but I have to say, when you dive into the details of everything that they witnessed, |
| 0:42.7 | it's satisfying in this way that I really didn't even know I craved because they're not talking |
| 0:48.2 | about like this or that specific incident, but about the entire system being broken, and they lay it out. |
| 0:56.1 | Today on our show, what we're going to do is we're going to bring you their stories, |
| 0:58.5 | and I think you'll see what I mean. |
| 1:00.9 | From WBZ Chicago, it's this American life. |
| 1:03.2 | I'm Ira Glass. |
| 1:04.3 | And we're just going to jump right in right now with Act 1. |
| 1:07.0 | Act 1, I got the memo. |
| 1:10.2 | Okay, so this thing just happened two weeks ago. |
| 1:13.0 | But 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. |
| 1:23.5 | What was so extreme? |
| 1:25.6 | They decided to stop training ICE agents and stop lawyering for ice agents and instead became a whistleblower. |
| 1:32.0 | Our producer, Nadi Raymond, talked to him. |
| 1:34.7 | This whistleblower, Ryan Schwank, will tell you proudly that he's a public servant. |
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