You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.

Laura Jedeed enlisted in the US Army right out of high school, eventually doing two deployments in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division. She felt that her military background might make her an attractive ICE agent candidate. For Slate, Jedeed reports on the ICE application process, one that has apparently little to no deep vetting for those who will be armed by the US government and put out on the streets, going door-to-door in a bid to deport illegal immigrants. After all, even with her distaste for the Trump administration out in the open on her social media platforms, they offered her a job anyway. Was her application an anomaly or indicative of deeply troubling problems with the recruiting process? You be the judge.

What are we to make of all this? To be clear, I barely applied to ICE. I skipped the steps of the application process that would have clued the agency in on my lack of fitness for the position. I made no effort to hide my public loathing of the agency, what it stands for, and the administration that runs it. And they offered me the job anyway.

It’s possible that I’m an aberration—perhaps I experienced some kind of computer glitch that affected my application and no one else’s. But given all of the above, it seems far more likely that ICE is running an extremely leaky ship when it comes to recruitment.