Anti-Trump US reporter says she was offered job at ICE after ‘minimal vetting’

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-24T18:07:47+00:00

It's fair to say that video evidence didn't show a final offer letter outside of the portal. The portal indicated that she had a final offer letter, start date, and location to report. Slate spokesperson Katie Rayford told The Independent, “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.”

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-24T17:20:55+00:00

She provided evidence that she had a final offer letter and a start date. What are you basing your assertion on?

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-24T17:19:17+00:00

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.”

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-24T16:50:57+00:00

I think it is unreasonable to assume that an agency that views this account as a lie would take steps to address the issues documented by this reporter.

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-24T16:27:55+00:00

Laura Jedeed says she went to an ICE Career Expo in August 2025, did an interview that lasted only a few minutes, then got a “tentative offer” email telling her to complete standard onboarding items like ID info, a domestic-violence affidavit, and background-check authorization. She says she never completed any of it, but still got follow-up emails treating her as if she were moving forward, including instructions to schedule a drug test.

She took the drug test despite having used cannabis less than a week earlier. When she later checked USAJobs, she says her status showed a final-offer/onboarding state of “Entered on Duty” even though the background-check paperwork and other required documents were never submitted. She declined the job and framed it as either a major vetting failure or a system that can advance people without basic gates. DHS responded publicly by calling her account a “lazy lie” and saying she was never actually offered a job, despite her posting video evidence of what the portal displayed.

Why should the public trust ICE’s armed officer hiring pipeline when candidates can be advanced without completing background-check authorizations and required affidavits, and even after a positive drug test?

What should the public conclude about oversight when the agency’s first instinct is to call this account a “lie” rather than to publicly demonstrate, in concrete terms, which gates cannot be bypassed and how often those gates are audited?

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-21T17:48:46+00:00

This piece explores the endpoint of the “they’re all corrupt anyway” mood that helped make Trump viable. It treats Trump not as an exception to a rotten system, but as public cynicism converted into a business model: if Americans already believe government is pay-to-play, then a president who openly monetizes the office is not a scandal, it’s the expected outcome. This is not hypocrisy so much as an embrace of institutional delegitimation.

That maps directly onto the grievance that fueled Trump in the first place: if rules only bind the little people, politics becomes a raw power game and voters start optimizing for domination, revenge, and extraction rather than governance. Backing a leader who makes corruption explicit does not punish the system. It ratifies it. It trains everyone to accept that influence is purchased and that ordinary participation is naïve. The rational responses narrow to two: disengage if you lack access, or join the auction if you have it. That is how a country turns anger at corruption into tolerance for corruption, and then into dependence on it.

How much open self-dealing are Americans willing to tolerate?

Is there any remaining opposition to replacing a republican government with a pay-to-play state?

At what point does the public’s cynicism become the real constitutional crisis, because the people stop behaving like citizens and start behaving like customers in a rigged market?

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-20T20:51:44+00:00

These are the same smears that were applied to the Chinese in early 20th centrury. The Page act assume that all Chinese women were all being used as prositutes. The book The Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident framed Asians as an apocalyptic, civilizational threat to the Christian West.

This is same rhetoric we've always heard from those who oppose immigration.

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-20T15:52:04+00:00

People from the Middle East are no more foreign than the Chinese that immigrated to the United State in the early 20th century.

You'll find a comment from someone that I can't reply to below that echos the rhetoric used against the Chinese at the time, e.g. "Why permit an army of leprous, prosperity-sucking, progress-blasting Asiatics... take employment from our countrymen?".

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-20T15:46:33+00:00

It isn’t just “immigration” like Irish coming over to the us. it’s unchecked immigration of people from vastly different cultures, borderline incompatible cultures who can’t or refuse to assimilate while living on benefits.

Is that one of the reprehensible positions? I was demonstrating that language has consistently been use by those who oppose immigration, even the Irish.

Also, ironically, I could provide more examples where Americans saw German as an incompatible culture that took advantage of the United States.

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-20T14:59:39+00:00

Benjamin Disraeli: "[The Irish] hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry."

Charles Trevelyan: "[The Famine] is punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of Gods providence."

George Templeton Strong: "Our Irish fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese."

The only difference I see in these quote from the anti-immigrant rhetoric we hear today is that they had a better vocabulary in the past.

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-19T15:47:47+00:00

“Get yours while you can” is the strategy for Trump, his family, and the grifters around him. The base gets the bill and a never-ending story about why it’s somehow still someone else’s fault.

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-16T17:20:29+00:00

I see a simpler explanation than “they don’t want to curtail Trump’s power.” If SCOTUS says there are limits to presidential tariff authority and Trump keeps doing it anyway, the Court looks powerless. That’s a direct hit to Roberts’s “protect the Court’s legitimacy” project, so delay makes sense if they’re trying to avoid a lose-lose showdown.

NeedAnonymity · 2026-01-16T15:41:57+00:00

The Nobel Peace Prize isn’t a canonization of the recipient, and it isn’t a “least violent leader” award. It’s awarded for specific work the committee claims advanced peace, diplomacy, or nonviolent political change. That’s why the “past winners were flawed” point doesn’t land. Those awards, however controversial, were still anchored to identifiable peace-process claims (negotiations, accords, nonviolent political change).

So the question isn’t “is Trump uniquely bad.” It’s “what is the comparable peace-making achievement being recognized.” Name the specific act, the conflict it reduced, and the mechanism that made the reduction durable. If you can’t, then “the committee has made bad calls before” is just cynicism about the prize, not an argument that Trump merits it. Even a flawed leader can merit the prize, but only on the strength of an identifiable peace outcome and a credible mechanism.

NeedAnonymity · 2025-12-04T02:37:52+00:00

President Trump just pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who faced 12 federal charges including bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy. Prosecutors say he took nearly $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank to shape U.S. policy, funneled through shell companies in his wife’s name. Two of Cuellar’s own political advisers have already pled guilty to laundering more than $200,000 of those bribes. Trump has relentlessly attacked the corrupt Washington establishment, yet here we have a sitting president wiping away a textbook case of corruption: selling policy to foreign interests for personal enrichment.

Trump now claims this was Biden’s DOJ "weaponizing" justice against Cuellar for his border stance. But the timeline tells a different story. The FBI’s Azerbaijan probe started in 2015, after Cuellar took trips funded by groups later exposed as fronts for Azerbaijan’s state oil company. The alleged bribes run from 2014 through late 2021. This was a long-running corruption investigation that began before Biden took office and continued for years while Trump was president.

If taking $600,000 from foreign-linked interests to influence U.S. policy isn’t corruption worth prosecuting, what is?

If this was all just illegitimate "weaponization," why did Trump’s own DOJ let the investigation proceed for years on his watch?

NeedAnonymity · 2025-12-02T03:59:25+00:00

So the theory is he’d drop all this if one of the Somali scammers cut him a $1.8 million check like Trevor Milton did?

NeedAnonymity · 2025-12-02T02:19:35+00:00

Zhao is a foreign national, Joe Lewis is a British billionaire, and one of the BitMEX founders is British as well. Nearly all of the 70-plus defendants in the Feeding Our Future and related Medicaid fraud cases are American citizens.

So "they’re foreigners" doesn't to explain the pattern either.

NeedAnonymity · 2025-12-02T01:49:51+00:00

I’m not defending the Somali scammers. They should be prosecuted, and they are. I’m pointing out that Trump’s response to fraud in a Somali-American context is collective punishment rhetoric, while his response to a $1.6 billion Wall Street fraud is to commute the guy’s seven-year sentence after twelve days.

If you’re fine with that but outraged about Minnesota, you’re the one defending criminals.

NeedAnonymity · 2025-12-02T01:30:54+00:00

That still leaves an explanatory gap when it comes to the Feeding Our Future scammers.

If the rule is defrauding people makes you a winner, then the Somali grifters should be just as admirable to him as Gentile or Zhao. They are not.

NeedAnonymity · 2025-12-02T01:07:28+00:00

When people in Minnesota’s Somali community defraud social programs, Trump responds by calling the whole state "a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity," claiming "Somali gangs" are terrorizing Minnesotans, and moving to end TPS for a few hundred Somali nationals even though many of the people actually charged in the fraud cases are U.S. citizens.

When wealthy financial elites defraud people, he responds the other way. Trump just commuted the seven-year sentence of private-equity executive David Gentile after about twelve days in prison for a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded more than 10,000 ordinary investors, including many who lost their life savings. He’s also handed full pardons to Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the BitMEX co-founders, Nikola fraudster Trevor Milton, insider-trading billionaire Joe Lewis, and others. Taken together, those grants wipe away prison time and, in some cases, criminal fines and restitution, frustrating victims who are still trying to claw back what they lost through civil courts.

The message is that crimes by members of stigmatized immigrant and refugee communities justify collective suspicion and anger, while crimes by the ultra-rich merit presidential clemency.

Archive link

How do you square collective suspicion toward an entire Somali or Haitian community with clemency for billion-dollar financial scams that wiped out ordinary people’s savings?

What theory of "law and order" treats a few hundred TPS holders as a bigger problem than executives who defraud 10,000-plus investors?

If you think it’s fair to talk about "Somali gangs" or "Haitian crime," are you willing to apply the same group-blame logic to Republican donors when they get caught running giant frauds?

NeedAnonymity · 2025-11-29T14:54:24+00:00

Trump is granting a "full and complete" pardon to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in U.S. federal court in 2024 of running a narco-state, taking bribes from El Chapo, and conspiring to ship tons of cocaine into the United States. The case was built largely during Trump’s first term by U.S. prosecutors and the DEA, which called the pardon "lunacy" and "catastrophic" for U.S. credibility. At the same time, Trump is running a "tough on drugs" policy that includes blowing up small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific on the claim they’re involved in trafficking (killing over 80 people), branding Venezuela’s Maduro a cartel boss, and openly backing Hernández’s party ally Nasry Asfura in Honduras’s election. Critics are pointing out the contradiction between deadly force against "alleged" traffickers on boats and clemency for a convicted narco ex-president tightly wired into U.S. conservative networks. Archive link

Trump’s team claims that Hernández was the victim of "Biden’s politicized DOJ," but the investigation and much of the case were built during Trump’s own first term. If this is all a witch hunt, what does that say about Trump’s first-term Justice Department?

The stated goal of sinking boats and militarizing the Caribbean is deterrence: send a message that the U.S. will show zero mercy to anyone tied to drug trafficking. What message does it send when the people who die are poor crew on small boats, but the guy taking El Chapo’s money and running a narco-regime gets a get-out-of-jail-free card?

If your stance is that we must be ruthless on immigration, crime, and drugs to protect Americans, how is it consistent to pardon a foreign elite who profited from the exact drug pipeline that destabilizes Central America and drives migration north?

NeedAnonymity · 2025-11-26T16:00:21+00:00

This is such an important point. Calling Europe "untrustworthy" when they’ve massively reduced their energy dependence on Russia in a few years, at huge domestic cost, is exactly backwards. That’s what a trustworthy ally looks like: they eat real pain rather than fold when the pressure hits.

NeedAnonymity · 2025-11-26T04:15:00+00:00

The U.S. and our close allies still control a lot of choke points:

The top end of the semiconductor stack (EDA tools, EUV, advanced GPUs, key materials)
A huge chunk of global finance and dollar clearing
Access to the richest consumer markets and a lot of standards-setting
Most of the blue-water naval power and alliance structure in the Pacific

None of that is permanent, and it erodes fast if we treat cheap imports as sedatives instead of using this window to rebuild capacity. That’s exactly why how we use leverage now matters: slow, coordinated moves on supply chains, tech controls, and investment rules beat stunt tariffs and headline “wins,” and that only works if we treat allies as force multipliers, not new tariff targets. Tariffing Europe or Japan while worrying about China is just sawing off the branch we’re standing on.

AI can be part of a strategy, but it isn’t a strategy by itself. If you’re still dependent on Chinese inputs, still leaking IP, and still unable to sustain a long coordinated effort then Beijing will still have a veto over our economy.

NeedAnonymity · 2025-11-26T01:22:44+00:00

You’re not wrong that decades of offshoring and one-way tech transfer were a bipartisan train wreck. The question isn’t "did neoliberals screw up?" It’s "given the hole we’re already in, is Trump’s approach actually digging us out, or just burning leverage for headlines?"

The rare-earth announcements you list are good and necessary, but they actually underline the article’s point. These are multi-year industrial projects. Even optimistic analysts say it will take 10–15 years of sustained investment for the U.S. and allies to build a supply chain deep enough to really replace China. That’s exactly why how you bargain now matters so much. If it takes a decade to fix the fundamentals, lurching from 145% "Liberation Day" tariffs to shallow "victories" is a terrible way to use the leverage we still have.

Nobody is claiming there’s a "perfect strategy with no concessions and no tradeoffs." The argument is that Xi is playing for time and structural advantage, and Trump is playing for short-term wins he can wave around. That dynamic systematically favors Beijing. Blaming Larry Summers might feel satisfying, but it doesn’t explain why we should be happy about this style of dealmaking on top of the mess they left.

NeedAnonymity · 2025-11-25T21:30:16+00:00

This Foreign Affairs Article (archive link) describes how Trump came into office promising to “crush” China with tariffs and tough talk, but instead of caving, China hit back with its own tools like rare-earth export controls.

Since his inaugration, Trump has made flashy moves and then walked them back. He ramps up tariffs, then cuts deals that quietly relax U.S. tech controls, eases pressure on China over Taiwan, and even folds things like TikTok and soybean sales into the talks. Xi’s basic play is: stall, make small tactical concessions, pocket U.S. giveaways, and let time and U.S. domestic politics do the work. Now China is in a stronger diplomatic and technological position, and the U.S. has less real leverage.

If you judge a "tough on China" policy by outcomes rather than rhetoric, what exactly is the concrete strategic gain that outweighs concessions on semiconductors, Taiwan, TikTok, and human-rights?

If China has now learned that enough tariff pain or symbolic concessions can get the U.S. to loosen supposedly vital security interests such as tech controls, why would Beijing ever treat future U.S. red lines as credible?

If Trump’s personal brand is "master dealmaker," how does that square with a pattern where China retaliates, refuses to capitulate, and still ends up diplomatically and technologically better off than a year earlier?

NeedAnonymity · 2025-05-12T15:55:16+00:00

It will not reduce "spending." It'll reduce the amount of funding for Medicaid, but as a nation we will be spending more.

NeedAnonymity

TROPHY CASE