Liberal journalist claims ICE accepted her recruitment application without proper vetting
A liberal journalist slammed what she described as the "sloppiness" of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for allegedly accepting her recruitment application despite being an outspoken critic of the Trump administration.
Laura Jadeed, who's been published in left-wing outlets like Rolling Stone, The Nation and The New Republic, revealed Tuesday that she was "hired" by ICE in a piece for Slate, calling out the "minimal screening" she underwent before being offered the job.
"The plan was never to become an ICE agent," Jadeed began the piece. "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?"
Jadeed, an Army veteran who was deployed twice to Afghanistan before becoming a journalist, said she assumed her online presence with rhetoric critical of President Donald Trump and ICE would prove she's a "less-than-ideal recruit." But later, at her interview appointment, the recruiter was "spectacularly uninterested" in her career following her military service, which Jadeed coyly described to her as "gig economy stuff."
"'They are prioritizing current law enforcement first. They’re going to adjudicate your résumé,' she told me. If my application passed muster, I’d receive an email about next steps, which could arrive in the next few hours but would likely take a few days. I left, thanked her for her time, and prepared to hear back never," Jadeed wrote. "I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up."
She continued, "'Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,' the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: 'If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.'
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"As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things. And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. "Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process," it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) 'Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.'"
Jadeed called the timing "unfortunate," telling readers she had smoked cannabis six days before her scheduled drug test. Nonetheless, she went to her local LabCorp and took a test with the expectation that she would be told she failed.
"Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at," Jadeed wrote. "Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job."
"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!'" she told readers. "By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me."
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Jadeed went on to speculate whether her employment would have ultimately been quashed as she proceeded forward, clicking the "decline" button instead.
"What are we to make of all this?" Jadeed asked. "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. With no oversight and with ICE concealing its agents’ identities, it’ll be extremely difficult for us to know," she wrote.
Jadeed went on to wonder whether ICE had potentially allowed domestic abusers, sex offenders and racists to get through their screening process.
"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?" she wrote.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to Fox News Digital's requests for comment.