Transcription
Here on Democracy Now, democracynow.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm 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 AY'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 Jadid 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 Jud joins us joins us now from Portland, Oregon. Uh 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.
>> Absolutely. So, the hiring event, basically, you brought your resume 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 resume, which was uh I did a skills-based resume. I'm a veteran. I served two years in Afghanistan. So on the surface the their resume 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 googable person. I have an unusual name. I am the only Laura Juded on the internet. And I make no secret of how I feel about ICE and Trump and all of it. Uh 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 tenative offer. I never filled out my background check paperwork. I never signed the affidavit saying I'd committed no domestic violence crimes. None of it. Uh a few weeks later, I got a message from LabCore saying that ICE wanted me to do a drug test. Uh and I went ahead and did that. I was pretty sure I wouldn't pass. I'd uh 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 had I had they processed the drug test yet? So, I logged onto 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 3 days earlier, uh I had listed that um I had accepted the offer. They had offered me a final position as a deportation officer. My background check was listed as completed 3 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.
>> Wow. Um, you write in the piece, at first glance, my resume has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America's Gustapo and waiting. Um, you're likening ICE to the Gustapo.
>> 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 cart blanch, a license to kill from our government. And we 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 US 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 unnamed armed thugs in masks who are terrorizing citizens.
So, you have served in the military. You deployed twice. Um, can you talk about um what that experience taught you? And also um you did do an uh interview with an agent and I'm wondering uh if you could tell us what that agent said to you um and where that went.
>> 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 telling people what to do.
>> I was in um eastern Afghanistan for the first deployment, western Afghanistan for the second.
>> So I did not see combat, but as a military intelligence uh collector, I saw plenty of the decisions that got people killed on both sides that didn't need to happen. Uh so I came back very disillusioned uh 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 uh 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.
Talk about your concerns about them not doing a background check. I mean, what does this mean for people who are documented to uh well, wife beaters, people kill women?
>> Yeah. I mean, it's very funny that they hired a lefty journalist with a profile on an anti-foot watch. That 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? um how many people who have been committed of of sex crimes or crimes against children are in charge of detention centers where people 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.
And you were hired to be a deportation officer. What exactly is that? Where would you serve?
>> Yeah. Uh so yes, deportation officer. Basically the um 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. Um, and when I expressed that that was fine with me with my analyst background, he he actually the 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. Uh, it's 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.
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.
>> Yes. Uh 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.
Laura Jade, I want to thank you for being with us. Freelance journalist who writes regularly on her Substack at Firewaldia.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. Thanks for watching Democracy Now. on YouTube. Subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications to make sure you never miss a video. And for more of our audience supported journalism, go to democracynow.org or where you can download our news app, sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to the daily podcast, and so much