“They didn’t ask very many questions.” Independent journalist and U.S. military veteran Laura Jedeed recounts how she was hired as a deportation officer by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a six-minute interview at a job fair in Texas, despite never signing any paperwork, not having completed a background check, likely failing a drug test, and publicly sharing her opposition to the Trump administration and its anti-immigrant crackdown. “It seems like the answer to the question, 'Who are they hiring?' is: They don’t know.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: What happens when ICE hires agents with minimal screening, then sends them into the streets masked and armed? We look now at the agency’s hiring practices as it surges agents to Minneapolis and other cities.
We begin with an independent journalist who applied for an ICE job and was offered it without even a background check. Laura Jedeed wrote about her experience in a piece published Tuesday by Slate magazine headlined “You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.” — was the headline.
She begins her piece, “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?” she said.
Laura Jedeed joins us now from Portland, Oregon.
Laura, would you take it from there? Explain what exactly you did, what this fair was, and then how you applied to work for ICE, and what happened.
LAURA JEDEED: Absolutely. So, the hiring event, basically, you brought your résumé in, you handed it over. They were going to do an interview, and they were promising on-the-spot hiring, to where you could, in fact, walk out with your $50,000 bonus that day, possibly.
I went in. I handed in my résumé, which was a — I did a skills-based résumé. I’m a veteran. I served two tours in Afghanistan. So, on the surface, the résumé looked pretty good. Had a very brief interview, took all of six minutes. They didn’t ask very many questions. And then I left, assuming I would never hear back, because I’m a very googleable person. I have an unusual name. I’m the only Laura Jedeed on the internet. And I make no secret of how I feel about ICE and Trump and all of it.
So I was not expecting several days later to receive a tentative offer. I missed it in my inbox, and it sunk to the bottom, which means that I never filled out the paperwork they requested. I never accepted the tentative offer. I never filled out my background check paperwork. I never signed the affidavit saying I committed no domestic violence crimes. None of it.
A few weeks later, I got a message from Labcorp saying that ICE wanted me to do a drug test, and I went ahead and did that. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t pass. I had partaken in legal cannabis six days before the test. But why not waste some of their money, right? And then, nine days after that, I decided I wanted to — you know, I was curious. Had they processed the drug test yet?
So I logged on to the ICE hiring portal. And what I found was that not only did the drug test not seem to be relevant, I had been — I was listed as having joined ICE as of three days earlier. I had listed that I had accepted the offer. They had offered me a final position as a deportation officer. My background check was listed as completed three days in the future from when I was looking at it. So, it seems like the answer to the question, “Who are they hiring?” is: They don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: Wow. You write in the piece, “At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting.” You’re likening ICE to the Gestapo?
LAURA JEDEED: Absolutely, and I don’t think that’s in any way hyperbole. We have armed, masked thugs on our street right now who are brutalizing, detaining and murdering people with apparent impunity, a carte blanche, a license to kill from our government. And they can’t even keep track of who’s behind the masks. I don’t believe for a second they’re keeping track of who’s a U.S. citizen, who needs to be deported, where these people even are. These disappearances, where people vanish into the system, is it on purpose, or are they really that sloppy with paperwork? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. This constitutes a national emergency. We have unknown, armed thugs in masks who are terrorizing citizens.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have served in the military. You deployed twice. Can you talk about what that experience taught you? And also, you did do an interview with an agent, and I’m wondering if you could tell us what that agent said to you and where that went.
LAURA JEDEED: Absolutely. So, I joined the military right out of high school. I really believed in the whole “war on terror” thing. I really thought we were going over to spread freedom and democracy, and what have you. And when I got there, it became very evident very quickly that that was not the case, and that we were doing very — it was a bad war, and we should not have been there —
AMY GOODMAN: Where were you?
LAURA JEDEED: — telling people what to do. I was in eastern Afghanistan for the first deployment, western Afghanistan for the second. So, I did not see combat, but as a military intelligence collector, I saw plenty of the decisions that got people killed on both sides that didn’t need to happen.
So I came back very disillusioned, like a lot of people, and actually like the ICE agent that I spoke to, which, by the way, this interview wasn’t actually part of the hiring process. It was an optional step to see if I wanted to join up. But he told me that he was — also joined right out of high school. He also deployed. And when he got back, he also got out as soon as he could. He didn’t want anything to do with the military. But he had a lot of trouble assimilating, as a lot of veterans do. And so, about six months later, he decided to go for law enforcement, and the rest is history. He’s been an ICE agent, he said, for about a decade. He likes the work. He feels like he’s getting instant results.
And this is very sad to me and also emblematic of a problem we have, where we use this language of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and freedom and democracy at the barrel of a gun. We did this overseas, and it’s come home in every conceivable way.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your concerns about them not doing a background check. I mean, what does this mean for people who are documented to — well, wife beaters, people who kill women?
LAURA JEDEED: Yeah, I mean, it’s very funny that they hired a lefty journalist with a profile on AntifaWatch. That’s hilarious. But what’s not funny is they didn’t make me sign a domestic violence waiver. So, how many people with domestic violence convictions are running around with guns in our cities terrorizing people? How many people who have been committed of sex crimes or crimes against children are in charge of detention centers where there’s no oversight, where people won’t be missed and won’t be believed? The horror, it just — it boggles the mind how bad this really is.
AMY GOODMAN: And you were hired to be a deportation officer. What exactly is that? Where would you serve?
LAURA JEDEED: Yeah, so, yes, deportation officer. Basically, the agent was very keen on letting me know that I wouldn’t be given a badge and a gun right away. I wouldn’t be out in the street messing people up. I would probably have to push paperwork for about six months before I got there. And when I expressed that that was fine with me, with my analyst background, he — actually, the atmosphere changed. He was like, “No, listen, we want everyone on the street with guns eventually.” And I had to reassure him that that was also fine. It seems like the focus is very much getting people out on the street with guns, and the focus of the people applying, apparently, is to get out on the street as quickly as possible to brutalize people.
AMY GOODMAN: I’ll just end by asking you — you said you signed up to fight the war on terror, and you served twice in Afghanistan. You call what’s happening here in the United States “the war on terror come home.”
LAURA JEDEED: Yes, this is — it is very sad. It is not surprising, but it is very sad. This is a national emergency. This is a state emergency. And frankly, it’s past time that governors called up the National Guard to protect the citizens, who elected them to keep them safe from the people actually terrorizing us in the streets.
AMY GOODMAN: Laura Jedeed, I want to thank you for being with us, freelance journalist who writes regularly on her Substack at FirewalledMedia.com. We’ll link to your new piece for Slate, which is headlined “You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.” We’ll link to it at democracynow.org.
