Personal Essay: I Joined ICE And On My First Day Learned It Was Not Exactly What I Thought It Was
A new recruit joins ICE expecting literal ice and slowly discovers a devastating acronym problem.
Starting a new job is always stressful, especially when you have spent three weeks telling your family you finally found steady work in the ice business. So nobody was more surprised than me when I arrived at ICE orientation and learned the organization did not, in any meaningful sense, deal with ice.
By 9:12 a.m., I had already asked three federal employees where they kept the freezer.
Looking back, there were signs. The job listing mentioned “field operations,” “rapid response,” and “protecting American communities,” which I took to mean emergency bagged-ice delivery after hurricanes, county fairs, and youth soccer tournaments. “Customs Enforcement” sounded, to me, like making sure a hotel bar did not hand out crescent cubes when a bride had specifically requested spheres.
That one is probably on me.
Still, the first red flag came when orientation began without tongs. There were no laminated diagrams of commercial ice machines, no discussion of pellet versus crushed, and no safety video about the dangers of letting a scoop touch the floor. Instead, a man named Deputy Section Chief Gordon Pail opened a PowerPoint titled The Mission Of U.S. Immigration And Customs Enforcement, which I initially assumed was the legal name for a very serious cooler company.
“I raised my hand and asked whether we would cover nugget ice before lunch,” I told reporters. “The room got quiet in a way I now recognize as national-security quiet.”
Officials said the misunderstanding escalated after I placed seven silicone cube trays on the conference table and asked if the agency preferred clear ice for cocktail service or the cloudy kind you get from a motel vending machine. According to one trainee, I also asked whether “detention” referred to the part of the freezer where ice has to sit overnight.
“I want to be clear that ICE does not manufacture, sell, distribute, store, or bless ice for commercial delivery,” said Carla Nance, an agency onboarding coordinator who paused several times before continuing. “Mr. Bledsoe brought a stainless-steel scoop clipped to his belt and repeatedly asked when he would be issued a parka. That is not part of our standard first-day equipment.”
The confusion reached its worst point around 10:30, when my supervisor told me I would be shadowing an administrative removal briefing and I said I would be more comfortable starting in “crushed.” Someone from HR then pulled me aside and explained, very slowly, that ICE was a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, not a patriotic subscription service for restaurants that had run out of cubes.
This was devastating news for a man wearing non-slip shoes from a previous Sonic job.
By noon, I had resigned from ICE and walked to a gas station across the street, where I purchased a 10-pound bag of actual ice and stood beside it in the parking lot for several minutes, just trying to get my head right. I do not know what the future holds for me professionally, but I do know this: the gas station understood the acronym immediately, and frankly, that counts for a lot.
