ICE Agents vs the ‘American Employment Model’

There’s a pattern I’ve now seen across nearly every industry I’ve worked in; cake, caregiving, temp labor, and, most recently, it’s showing up in federal employment.

It always starts the same way.

You’re offered a job that sounds stable. Reasonable. Sometimes even generous. The role is clearly described. The pay is stated. The language signals opportunity: growth, trust, professionalism, purpose.

Then you arrive.

And slowly, quietly, the job you’re doing stops resembling the job you were promised.

Not in a dramatic way. Nothing that would justify a walkout on day one. Just enough of a shift that you start adjusting. Taking on more. Explaining less. Absorbing the difference because you’re already there, already committed, already needing the work.

This isn’t miscommunication. It’s design.

The switch depends on timing.

Terms don’t change before you accept the job. They change after you’ve rearranged your life around it. After you’ve turned down other opportunities. After you’ve invested labor, loyalty, or identity into the role.

Pay becomes negotiable in practice, if not on paper.

Responsibilities expand without being renamed.

Boundaries soften, always in one direction.

When questioned, it’s framed as flexibility. Teamwork. Professional maturity.

Exit, however, is framed as failure.

I first noticed this clearly years ago, working in a bakery.

The role was advertised as cake design. What the job actually required was broad, undefined labor: café work, prep, cleanup, late nights, speed under pressure. None of that was inherently bad work. Much of it was useful. Some of it I’m still grateful to have learned.

What was telling was that the scope expanded without conversation, without renegotiation, and without acknowledgment that the job itself had changed.

The people doing the most skilled and exhausting labor held the least power. The hierarchy above them existed primarily to oversee, manage, and receive credit. That structure works smoothly until someone underneath it is visibly capable and insufficiently deferential.

Then the work becomes less about output and more about containment.

I’ve seen the same thing outside of kitchens.

A job listed at one wage quietly becomes another once you show up.

A job listed in Menlo Park is actually in Atherton.

A clearly defined caregiving role accumulates emotional labor, logistical management, and time creep because “you’re already here.”

Temp work relies on people who can’t afford to walk away, so the terms remain fluid while compliance is expected to be fixed.

This model only works because leaving is expensive.

Which Brings Me to ICE.

Recently, ICE agents have been speaking publicly about their working conditions.

They report not being paid in weeks. Promised healthcare benefits that haven’t materialized. A heavily advertised $50,000 bonus that turns out to be distributed over five years, and must be repaid if they quit or are fired.

Many didn’t understand these terms when they signed on.

I’m not bringing this up for irony or schadenfreude *but also…kindof Haha(?)*. I’m bringing it up because the mechanism is unmistakable.

Promise first.

Dependency second.

Clarify the fine print once exit becomes costly.

This is not an anomaly. It’s the American employment model functioning normally.

Africans were coerced here through force. Everyone else was tricked. They were brought through contracts, incentives, and opportunity narratives that sounded generous until they weren’t.

Different methods. Same logic.

Secure labor by limiting exit.

Change the terms after arrival.

Frame endurance as character.

This country didn’t abandon that logic. It refined it.

What I’ve taken with me from these jobs isn’t bitterness or grievance. It’s pattern recognition.

I didn’t lose skill. I didn’t lose capacity. I gained endurance, speed, precision, and an unusually clear understanding of how power moves when gratitude is expected but autonomy is discouraged.

Once you see the pattern, you stop personalizing outcomes that were structural from the start.

And once you stop doing that, the switch loses some of its power.