The story about being hired by ICE below, by independent journalist Laura Jedeed, should scare us. It is clear, given ICE’s irresponsibility, that their behavior in Minneapolis will remain the standard.
This ICE critic, Laura Jedeed, was offered a job
Laura Jedeed writes the following for Slate.com.
The plan was never to become an ICE agent. The plan, when I went to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Career Expo in Texas last August, was to learn what it was like to apply to be an ICE agent. Who wouldn’t be curious? The event promised on-the-spot hiring for would-be deportation officers: Walk in unemployed, walk out with a sweet $50k signing bonus, a retirement account, and a license to brutalize the country’s most vulnerable residents without consequence—all while wrapped in the warm glow of patriotism.
At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.
Even though there is an easily found body of work showing she is a critic of everything related to the Trump administration, and having missed deadlines to accept employment, she was still employed.
According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”
I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”
By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.
Laura concludes with a prescient statement.
There’s a temptation to take some comfort in ICE’s sloppiness. There’s a real argument here that an agency so inept in its recruitment will also be inept at training people and carrying out its mission. We’re seeing some very sloppy police work from ICE, including an inability to do basic things like throw someone down and cuff them. On some level, all of this is a reminder that their takeover is neither total nor inevitable.
But if they missed the fact that I was an anti-ICE journalist who didn’t fill out her paperwork, what else might they be missing? How many convicted domestic abusers are being given guns and sent into other people’s homes? How many people with ties to white supremacist organizations are indiscriminately targeting minorities on principle, regardless of immigration status? How many rapists and pedophiles are working in ICE detention centers with direct and unsupervised access to a population that will be neither believed nor missed? How are we to trust ICE’s allegedly thorough investigations of the people they detain and deport when they can’t even keep their HR paperwork straight?
Read the entire lengthy article. It will give you the necessary perspective on another incompetent Trump department. The Trump administration is likely the most corrupt and incompetent administration in our lifetime, if not the country’s lifetime. Cleaning up after he is gone will be a difficult but necessary task. It is imperative that we start identifying the defects in his administrative infrastructure now. Jadeed’s work is probative.
Laura Jedeed is an independent freelance journalist and the founder of Firewalled Media. She has written at Politico, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New Republic, Slate, among many other substantive publications. She is a veteran. More importantly, as an investigative reporter, she has broken a very important story that has repercussions we are living through today with ICE.
