Leftist Army Veteran Walks Into Career Expo; Accidentally Gets Hired By ICE

We follow a veteran journalist’s surreal path through an ICE career expo that “hired” her without finished paperwork, then track how speed, bed quotas, and private prison incentives warp vetting and accountability. We connect personal stories, federal denials, and the money trail to show how throughput beats caution.

• audiobook update for Rethinking Broken and request for reviews
• Laura Jadeed’s six-minute interview and optional screening
• tentative email turning into a final offer and start date
• DHS public denial vs screen-recorded receipts
• sign-on bonuses and the detention bed quota economy
• recruiting veterans into street-first enforcement roles
• trauma, conditioning, and the pipeline from military to ICE
• incentives that favor speed over safety and oversight
• questions about abusers, extremists, and inadequate vetting

Please leave an honest review on Audible if you listen to the audiobook

Transcript

Housekeeping And Book Update

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, Owl Medicine, and welcome back to another episode. Last episode, we covered ice and their money, and I wanted to continue this. I promised you that I would continue that with a new story about an accidental ice agent. That's what we're here for today. But first, a little housekeeping. If you didn't know, the audiobook for Rethinking Broken has been available on rethinkingbroken.com for a while. That's my best-selling um self-help book about childhood trauma and how childhood trauma didn't break you. It trained you. It's been available in paperback, hardback, ebook, and audiobook on rethinkingbroken.com for a while, where there is also merch that people are really liking my sweater. I ordered some to make sure that they were right, like alright, and people really like them. I really like them. Organic cotton and recycled polyester, and they've got the cute heart from the cover on them. Anyway, you can get all that stuff at rethinkingbroken.com, but the new update is that the audiobook is available on Audible. So if you if you're an Audible person, go download it, go listen to it on Audible. Um, that's exciting because it that is more reach. Um, I got a photo from a friend this morning showing me the book on Audible, which is great. Um, it has zero reviews because I just put it on Audible. So if you do decide to do that, please leave a review. However, you experience the book, be honest. But uh reviews are really helpful. So now that that's out of the way, uh I went back to dig up this story on um the accidental ice agent. And oh, this has been this has been really, really fun. So, here's what I found. There's this journalist named Laura Jade. She is an army veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne. And shout out to the 82nd Airborne. I got some fam in the 82nd Airborne. Um, thanks, cuz. And she also is an outspoken critic of ICE and the Trump administration. Like, super outspoken. Like, she has a Substack, she's an independent journalist and is writes on her on her Substack and has article published on Slate and others, including an article about this exact um uh situation on Slate, where she also did an interview with Democracy Now. Um that's worth uh that's worth a listen. She is easily Googleable because of her name. You'll find articles in her writings titled things like What I Saw in LA wasn't an insurrection, it was a police riot. And in August of 2025, she saw that ICE was holding career expos, like mass hiring event things. So, um, with recruiters promising signing bonuses of up to$15,000 on the spot, she was like, hmm, this is interesting, let's go. Obviously, she had no interest in joining ICE, but wanted to like go through the process, see what this was like. So her curiosity got the better of her. Curious about who they were hiring and how, she decided to go. She went into uh Arlington, Texas, at an esports stadium, actually, big screens playing loud recruitment videos of ICE agents breaking down doors, traumatic music, or dramatic music, like a whole production. She figured she would do a little experiment. She built a skills-based resume, which was smart of her as an army veteran and an intelligence officer. So that highlighted her military background, and she just left out the journalist bit. Um, her thinking was pretty simple. If this gets me in the door, they'll type my name into a computer, see my writing, see my politics, and that's the end of it. A six-minute experiment, and then back to her life. And that is not what happened. So she did have a six-minute interview. The expo was on day two when she got there. Maybe a hundred and fifty people, with recruiters all over the place, eager to move through candidates, she waited in line, handing over her resume, sat through the video loop, and then came the interview. Six minutes. They asked her her name, her date of birth, confirmation of her military service, what um like why she left the army, and that was it. No questions about her politics, no Google search, and most importantly, no background questions at this stage. Just a six-minute interview, and the recruiter telling her to watch for an email. Here's the really fun part if you listen to the Democracy Now um interview. The interview was optional. Like, you could do an interview if you wanted to find out if you wanted to be an ICE agent, but if you knew, you didn't even need to do the six-minute interview. How crazy is that? Anyway, before she left, she talked with an active deportation officer who was there. The person doing the interview was actually another was a deportation officer who was also a military veteran. And when she said that she was an intelligence analyst and that she might prefer a desk job, the guy shifted immediately because he was like, Oh, you know, well, we might we might not be able to get you on the streets immediately with guns. And she's like, That's totally fine. I am super okay with that. I was a an intelligence officer analyst person, so I'm more of a desk pusher anyway. And then that's when he his demeanor shifted completely, and he was like, Well, actually, like, we want everybody out on the street with guns, like as soon as possible. Um, which is wild. Uh, so she had to reassure him uh that that was fine too. She had no problem being out in the guns and um harassing people. That made him feel better, and she left thinking that that would be the end. She went back to her life and assumed that any day someone would type in her name, find the articles about all the crap that she'd written, and that would be the end of it. But she never heard back. Days passed, she forgot about it, and like who cares? But weeks later, she got an email office um an email in her inbox that said tentative offer from ICE. They offered her a job. Now, here's the thing: she never actually filled out any paperwork that they requested because uh the email that offered her the job, that email fell to the bottom of her inbox. She missed it. So she found it weeks after it showed up. But they did ask about a drug test, and they asked about an affidavit if she had ever committed domestic violence. Well, she never filled out the domestic violence affidavit, but she did decide to do a drug test. And she did the drug test, sent it in, and assumed that she would fail again because she had participated in legal cannabis six days before. No big deal, thought that would be the end of it. She forgot about it for a little while, but a week later was like, you know what? Out of curiosity, let me just let me just look. Um, so she did. She looked on October 3rd. She goes to USA Jobs, the federal government's hiring portal, and she checked on her application status. And what she saw didn't didn't make any sense at all because she was working for ICE. She had been given a final office, a final offer as a deportation officer, which is wild for a like super a super lefty journalist um who hates Trump and ICE and doesn't make any like qualms about that whatsoever. She had been apparently working for ICE for three days at this point. Mind you, she never filled out any more of the information. She never filled out the domestic abuse reports, she never filled out like the um the contracts or any of that. They just went, oh well, you're a name. We can assign you a number and a gun. Sure. Why not? So she screen recorded the entire everything. Like the login process, the portal, the job title, the start date. They um her drug test was said that she passed it. Or no, um, her drug test said that she passed, but her background check said that she passed it three days in the future from the date that she was looking at it. And I'm really glad that she like screen recorded all of this, because it's just hilarious. And so my my favorite question from the interview is like, so who are they hiring? And her response is, uh, they don't know. They have no idea who they're hiring. They have no clue. ICE has no idea who they're hiring. So then the denial all starts. The article went viral, and the Department of Homeland Security posted on um X or formerly Twitter and called her a liar, said um that, and this is a direct quote here this individual was never offered a job at ICE. Applicants may receive a tentative selection letter following their initial application and interview. That is not a job offer. A strong statement, a very clear denial from the Department of Homeland Security. For most people, that would be the end, but not for Laura Jede. She had the screen recording and she posted it, which clearly showed that it was a final offer, an onboarding date, not a tentative selection letter. Slate stood by her reporting, which is the the place where she uh posted the article. Slate stood by her. The spokesperson Katie Rayford told The Guardian, and I quote, We stand by our reporting, which reveals minimal vetting in ICE's hiring process. Evidence, including video documentation, shows the journalist who reported this story advanced through multiple hiring stages beyond the tentative selection letter, including receiving a final offer letter and being given a start date. DHS never explained the discrepancy, never explained how a tentative selection morphs into an entered on-duty status for somebody who completed their, like, well, for her, no paperwork. So, Jadeed offered her own theory. DHS has no idea whether ICE offered her a job, which is kind of the point. They have no idea what they're doing, like zero idea what they're doing. Obviously. Okay, so I wanted to connect this to the money, and here's how we do that. ICE was offering sign-on bonuses of up to$50,000, and that's not chump change. That is especially not chump change for people who tend to join the military. And that's important because the interviewer that interviewed uh Laura Jadeed was an army veteran, and he had been working for ICE for 10 years because he joined the military, uh, believed in the whole uh like getting rid of terrorism thing. That was when when we're all the same age. I'm 38, I'm the same age as these people. And they did the same thing I did. We believed in the war on terrorism and shutting it down and making the world a better, safer, more Christian place. Like we all believed that, hook, line, and sinker, when we joined. Now we're a little we're a little to a lot disillusioned by all of this. But that$50,000 is not chump change. That's a recruitment tool that you deploy when you need bodies and you need the bodies fast. Because how um and why do you need bodies fast? Because you have to you have to mandate to fill beds. Remember that 90% bed mandate that we talked about in the last episode? Detention centers have to stay fully or have to stay full in order to stay profitable. Private prison contracts guarantee a certain number of beds filled, paid per diem. Empty beds lose money. Full beds make money. You keep beds full, you need enforcement. To have enforcement, you need officers. To get officers fast, you offer fifty grand and six minute interviews. And you don't dig deep into anybody's background because digging deep takes time, and time is beds, and beds are money. The recruiter told her they wanted everyone on the street with guns eventually. That's not about careful vetting, that's about throughput. Moving people through a pipeline, getting them to the point where they can start making arrests, filling beds, and justifying the next round of federal funding? And here's the question her story raises that no one in DHS answered. If they missed the fact that she was an anti-ICE journalist who didn't fill out her paperwork, what else are they missing? Like, what else are they missing? How many convicted domestic abusers are being given guns and sent into other people's homes? How many people with ties to white supremacist organizations are indiscriminately targeting minorities on principle regardless of immigration status? How many people with untreated trauma, unmanaged mental health conditions, unexamined biases are being put out into the street with badges and the power to arrest people with absolute immunity? And their only priority is speed. How many pedophiles are running detention centers where children are being kept? My guess is like a lot of them. A lot of them. Have you thought about that like how many, especially around the Brownsville, Texas area? Which I've I've like that's a part of really southwest Texas, one of the biggest, um, that and Tijuana are like the two biggest um places where uh the two biggest border crossings for people coming in from Mexico into the United States. How many juvenile detention centers are there? And how many power tripping pedophiles ICE is hiring? Because they're not hiring good people, obviously. They're hiring anybody who wants to come and needs fifty thousand dollars. You know who we judge that needs money and they do things to get their money? Drug dealers. Why is a drug dealer worse than an ICE agent? A drug dealer is selling drugs. They're selling something that people want to the people who want it, knowing it's dangerous. ICE is taking people who don't want to go anywhere and are helpful and whole people and ripping them apart, murdering them, like sending them out of the country, locking them in cages for money. Now I mentioned the story that there are at the top of the story that there are two stories here. In my research, I kept running into references to a second woman. Someone was hired but never finished filling out the application. Someone who's experienced parallel Jade's but wasn't a f wasn't as fully documented. What I found is that Laura Jadeed's story actually contains that element. She never finished filling out the application. She ignored every request for paperwork, and the system processed her anyway. So I mentioned that there were two stories before, and I tried to find what those two stories were, and it turned out that it was actually a story being told by the left of the full story of Laura Jadeed, and a story being told by the right that was just bits and pieces of Laura Jadide's story put together in a way to devalue the story and make it all sound like bullshit. So to tie this all together, Laura Jadeed is not an ICE agent, even though she was hired by one. She she turned down the job that she was offered. Or that um appeared in her portal as offered. Or however you want to characterize what happened, but for a moment in fall of 2025, the system thought that she was. The bureaucratic gr gears stamped her as one of its own. And the question she went to answer is who is ICE hiring? And it turns out that ICE doesn't know. The Department of Homeland Security doesn't know. Nobody knows. No one knows because they don't care. They're hiring anyone who is willing. These people are Nazis. And that's fucked. It's really fucked because what's happened? Many of these ICE agents are veterans who were brainwashed into the American story, the American dream, American greatness, American exceptionalism, and that our way is the only way, and they went overseas and did terrible things, and they don't know how to cope with that outside of to double down on the belief system that made them do those terrible things. And then they come back to the United States and they try to integrate back into society and they cannot. They can't because they have been broken by the federal government who chewed them up and spit them out and signed them up for wars that they didn't have any business fighting, but it made someone money. And these people get out of the military, are deeply fucked up, they cannot seem to integrate into society healthfully, and what do they do? They join ICE. These are children that join the military at 17 and 18 years old from the most uneducated, poor, impoverished, and deeply psychologically conditioned into American exceptionalism. We come from those cultures. And I don't believe that anybody makes a decision for themselves until at least the age of 30, because up until that point we're just doing what we're programmed to do. And this is what I hate. This is what I hate most is that these people are fucking Nazis. Every single one, every single Ice Agent is a fucking Nazi, and I'm not sure that they had a choice. I'm not I'm not entirely sure that they had a choice because they're broke, they're brainwashed, they're raised in a culture like I was raised in. That was based entirely on lies and bullshit. And they believed it because they were told they needed to be good. And this is how to be good, to protect to shut down your brain entirely. I I posted about this recently about the um I made a short video real thing about strength with men and why men seem so dumb. Uh-huh. And it's because just like light has to have darkness, strength has to have weakness, and if a man can only be strong, they can't actually be strong because that means also being weak. Because you can't have light without dark, and you can't have strength without weakness. So if men have to appear strong but can't actually be strong, what is the closest approximation? The closest approximation is inert. That means you can't think, you can't have your own thought processes, you can't be alive be aware of in any of your internal processes, your own thoughts, your own emotions, your own reactions. You can't you can't be tuned into any of those things because then you have to suppress those things. And that takes a lot of energy. And the measure of a man in the modern world is how miserable can you be on the inside before you let anybody else know. Now you take these people who have been so shut down internally and sh so shut down mentally and emotionally, and you give them guns at 18 years old and you tell them to go overseas and to murder people in the name of freedom and justice and rightness. And then you don't give a shit about them when they come back. You make them fight tooth and nail for every single thing that you promised them for the housing for your benefits, just to be able to get a damn doctor's appointment. Treat them like hell. But hey, they were treated pretty good while they were actually under contract, so why not sign another contract? And now we go from the 82nd airborne to ICE. This is the pipeline. This is the pipeline. All of the systems together create the system that we talk about. And all of the systems work together to create this. Every single one. We need people impoverished because we need to be able to offer them socialism in order for them. To kill people for us. We always need a pliable portion of the population, and it doesn't need to be that much. It doesn't need to be that high of a percentage. Three or four percent at any given point in time, it's like the military. It's like one 1% is active duty, like 3 or 4% or something like that, nationwide, something like that. It's been years, I don't remember. But that's how we recruit people for the military, isn't it? We price housing to where it's completely unaffordable, healthcare to where it's completely unaffordable. Education to where it's completely unaffordable. But hey, join the military. Do what you're told. Don't think. Don't have morals. And you can have housing. You can have healthcare. You can even get dental envision. How crazy is that? All you have to do is murder people. This is why we'll never have uh affordable things like this. It's because we need these things as recruitment tools for active duty, and which is the perfect priming ground to create the Nazi pieces of shit that I feel really horrible for. I feel really, really horrible for because I went through that same pipeline. Luckily I f I found wonderful people and psilocybin and the West Coast and did a lot of meditation and therapy. And these things helped me see how d uh horrible my worldview was. But this is Laura Jadid. This is what ICE does. They don't care. They're hiring whoever they want to make money, to make a bunch of money for the corrections in the United States. Because remember, in that last episode we covered the uh Corrections uh Corporation of America, the CCA, is now Core Civic, which is one of those two primary holders of all the contracts with ICE. So here we are. Laura Jadid, hired by ICE as a leftist, ICE-hating, Trump-hating, leftist liberal. And they had no idea they hired her. And then DHS lied about it and said they'd never give her a job, and that was the end of it for a lot of people. Anybody on the right. I'm like, ah, that didn't happen. Fake news. Fake news comes more out of the White House than it does anywhere else in the world. So thank you for sticking with me to the end of this. And join me next week, or two weeks from now, and I will have another fun, interesting um podcast for you. I'm not gonna promise what it is, because every time I promise what it is, then I wind up not wanting to do it and I take extra time to do the next one. So thank you for spending your time with me. And remember, stay curious and stay on.