A rookie immigration officer fresh out of the Trump administration’s abbreviated basic training program made critical errors in paperwork that became the government’s justification for detaining a California man for days in December, federal court records show.
The officer, Nolan De Long, was hired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a recruitment surge that began last summer as the administration pushed for record numbers of arrests and deportations. One of De Long’s first assignments involved arresting Carlos De La Garza, a 55-year-old longtime Berkeley resident, at the end of a routine appointment related to his green card application, court records show.
De Long later acknowledged his mistakes that day in a sworn statement filed in court and obtained by The Washington Post. Due to his “lack of experience,” he said, he had misunderstood federal immigration jargon and believed that De La Garza’s residency bid had been denied — though it hadn’t. He repeated his misunderstanding on a form that government attorneys cited in court to justify the detention. On the same form, he also wrongly reported that De La Garza had admitted to illegally entering the country in 2015.
The errors were exposed when De La Garza challenged the legality of his detention in federal court. Attorneys for the government dropped their opposition to his release after discovering their case relied on De Long’s misrepresentations. De Long apologized to De La Garza and the court, saying he understood the “seriousness of this mistake.”
De Long had been on the job for less than a month, and it was only the second time he had completed the particular form he bungled, court records show. At basic training, he had received only one-third of the instruction time the agency once dedicated to teaching recruits how to fill out that form, according to a review of court filings and Department of Homeland Security records obtained by The Post.
While De Long did not directly attribute his mistakes to his training, the case underscores questions members of both parties raised in congressional hearings last month about the rapid hiring and training of new ICE officers. A whistleblower told members of Congress — and The Post independently corroborated — that ICE eliminated more than 200 hours from its basic training program, or more than 40 percent of instructional time. The cuts came as the Trump administration sought to quickly increase agency staffing to support the president’s goal of doubling the number of deportation officers in the field by the end of 2025.
DHS records show that as of early March, more than 1,300 new officers had graduated from a truncated version of in-person basic training. The records show that more than 3,000 others received an even shorter online training, which DHS officials have said was designed for recruits with prior law enforcement experience.
De Long could not be reached for comment. In a statement, DHS declined to answer questions about De Long or his training and objected to publicizing the names of officers, saying that doing so could put them at risk. DHS also insisted — as it has previously to The Post — that training time for new officers has not been reduced, in part because the basic program has been supplemented by 28 days of on-the-job training.
In its statement, DHS acknowledged that “there was a paperwork error” but minimized its significance. DHS also emphasized that De La Garza has a criminal record and had previously been deported several times.
“The form was corrected by the officer’s supervisor and delivered to his attorney. A clerical error should not stop us from being able to detain and deport criminal illegal aliens who threaten our communities,” the statement said.
A federal judge last week ruled that De La Garza’s December detention was unlawful. Whether he will ultimately be allowed to stay in the country will be decided in separate, ongoing immigration proceedings. The legality of De La Garza’s most recent entry to the United States, in 2008, is in dispute.
In a statement, De La Garza’s immigration attorney, Amalia Wille, said he has taken responsibility for past mistakes and has followed the law in applying for permanent residence. “Mr. De La Garza is a beloved member of his community who has devoted his life to providing loving care for his profoundly disabled U.S. citizen son,” Wille said. “DHS illegally arrested him at his green card interview as part of this administration’s effort to instill fear in our community and disregard due process.”
De La Garza first came to the United States from Mexico in the early 1990s, according to court filings made on his behalf. He bought a home in Berkeley where he has lived for decades. His wife and son were both U.S. citizens, and both died of illness in recent years. At the time of his arrest, De La Garza had official authorization to work in the U.S. pending the outcome of his application for permanent residency.
De La Garza had disclosed his criminal record to immigration authorities, and yet they had continued processing his green card application and had not sought to detain him, according to the filings.
The filings indicate that his record includes three misdemeanors from the 1990s, expunged drug-related convictions and, most recently, a 2014 charge for assaulting a responding police officer during a mental health crisis — an incident that DHS said involved a firearm. It was a wake-up call for De La Garza, who pleaded no contest, served five years of probation and hasn’t been charged with a crime since, according to the filings.
De Long had no previous experience in immigration matters when he was hired by ICE in September 2025, court records show. He was one of the first officers sent to a shortened version of basic training, according to DHS records. After leaving the ICE academy on Nov. 4, he went to work as a deportation officer in San Francisco.
De Long and another ICE officer arrested De La Garza on Dec. 1 at a federal immigration office in San Francisco. De La Garza was sent to a detention center in Bakersfield, court records show.
Wille immediately filed an emergency petition for his release in federal court in Oakland, stating she believed her client had been unconstitutionally detained without due process.
In its response in court, the government pointed to the inaccurate information from the form De Long had filled out the day De La Garza was arrested to argue that he was subject to “mandatory detention.”
But the information in that report wasn’t true, Wille told the court.
On Dec. 4, Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. ordered ICE to temporarily release De La Garza while the government further argued its case for his detention in court. Gilliam ruled that regardless of the disputed facts, De La Garza did not appear to be a flight risk or a danger to the community.
Later that month, the government dropped its opposition to his release, telling the court that it had investigated and agreed with Wille that it had — inadvertently — cited false information about De La Garza to justify his detention, court records show.
On New Year’s Eve, the government filed the sworn declaration from De Long, who said that because of his inexperience he had “inadvertently included inaccurate information” when he filled out De La Garza’s I-213, a form often used by the government as the basis for detaining an immigrant and initiating deportation proceedings.
At basic training, records show, De Long had received just four hours of instruction on how to conduct an interview and fill out an I-213, down from the 12 hours that were previously dedicated to the topic.
De Long explained that as he filled out De La Garza’s I-213, he had used sample language from a different case — and then had failed to delete the irrelevant portions.
Ryan Schwank, the ex-ICE attorney who raised alarms about the agency’s shortened training at one congressional hearing last month, said both the officer who filled out the form and their supervisor are expected to review an I-213 for accuracy before it is submitted.
“Between those two steps there is supposed to be a level of assurance on the quality of the final document which justifies the court treating it as a presumptively accurate depiction of events,” Schwank said.
After learning of the errors underpinning De La Garza’s detention, the government’s attorneys did not oppose the judge’s final order, which prohibits DHS from detaining him again — unless he is charged with a new crime or an immigration judge decides he should be removed from the country.
De La Garza’s wife died of cancer in 2020, leaving him the primary caretaker for their severely disabled adult son, who was born with cerebral palsy. After his son’s death last year, De La Garza wrote to immigration authorities considering his residency application. He would be heartbroken, he wrote, if he were deported and unable to visit their graves in California.
For reasons that are not made clear in the filings reviewed by The Post, De La Garza was denied a green card after he was released from detention last year, opening him up to possible deportation in the future.
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