Anti-ICE activist infiltrates department and is offered job — despite huge red flags

An anti-ICE activist managed to successfully infiltrate the group, even being offered a job as a deportation officer.

Columnist Laura Jedeed confirmed she had not only been offered a position in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement wing, but had her health and fitness checks signed off in advance.

Not only were the checks signed off as "completed" before the date had passed, but the Slate columnist claimed she'd cleared the background checks without having to provide much information — and despite her background throwing up multiple red flags.

"I clicked through to my application tracking page," she wrote. "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. Perhaps, if I’d accepted, they would have demanded my pre-employment paperwork, done a basic screening, realized their mistake, and fired me immediately."

"And yet, the pending and upcoming tasks list suggested a very different outcome. My physical fitness test had been initiated on Oct. 6, it said: three days in the future. My medical check had apparently been completed on Oct. 6."

The fact that she got hired left her shocked.

"At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting," she wrote. "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.

"The catch, however, is that there’s only one 'Laura Jedeed' with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like 'What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot' and 'Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.'

"Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit."

Though Jedeed declined to accept the employment offer, she did note some who had joined the organization were being told to prepare for on-the-street action rather than administrative work.

Jedeed wrote, "The officer ran down other departments I might end up in: Prosecutions, Removal Coordination Unit, or Detention. The point being that I should not expect to be a badass street officer on Day 1."

“'I have so many guys that come over to me, they’re like, "I’m gonna put cuffs on somebody. I’m gonna arrest somebody." Well, you need to master this first and then we’ll see about getting you on the field.' I told him that I was fine with office work—with my analyst background, it seemed like a better fit for my skill set anyway."

"His attitude shift was subtle, but instant and unmistakable; this was the wrong attitude and the wrong answer. 'Just to be upfront, the goal is to put as many guns and badges out in the field as possible,' he said."

Jedeed went on to suggest the "only thing ICE is screening for is a desire to work for ICE: a very specific kind of person perfectly suited for the kind of mission creep we are currently seeing."

The columnist concluded that ICE was falling well behind where due dilligence is concerned. "But given all of the above, it seems far more likely that ICE is running an extremely leaky ship when it comes to recruitment," Jedeed wrote. "With no oversight and with ICE concealing its agents’ identities, it’ll be extremely difficult for us to know."