Throughout the day, people sent me a story about a SWAT team in Stockton, California raiding a man’s house because his estranged wife defaulted on her student loans. According to the Department of Education, the raid was not executed over bad student loans, but it was part of an unspecified “ongoing criminal investigation.” That’s troubling but relatively routine in today’s America. What’s shocking is that the DoE did not use the local SWAT team for this, instead deploying their own team of jackboots:

U.S. Department of Education spokesman Justin Hamilton confirmed for News10 Wednesday morning federal agents with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), not local S.W.A.T., served the search warrant…

OIG is a semi-independent branch of the education department that executes warrants for criminal offenses such as student aid fraud, embezzlement of federal aid and bribery, according to Hamilton. The agency serves 30 to 35 search warrants a year…

[Stockton] Police officers did not participate in breaking Wright’s door, handcuffing him, or searching his home.

Seriously? The Department of Education has a police force? And it executes paramilitary raids? Words fail.

Update: A summer intern at the Department of Education emailed me to pass along this fact sheet about the Department’s Office of Inspector General and the raid in question. I doubt this is how this intern imagined his first few weeks on the job playing out.