People are asking what kind of person willingly takes a job where you throw on a mask, grab people off the street, shoot pastors with pepper rounds, or rip crying babies away from their parents. And now a recent case is giving everyone an even darker look at the kind of person who ends up working at ICE.
In Minnesota, an ICE employee from the Twin Cities area has been arrested for trying to meet up with someone he thought was an underage girl. Police ran a sting operation called Operation Creep, and he was one of 16 men caught in it.
The man is 41-year-old Alexander Steven Back. Police say he answered a fake online ad and started talking to an undercover officer pretending to be a girl named Bella. At one point Bella told him, “I’m a little younger than the ad says.” He said, “Sure.” She then said she was 17. Police checked twice that he understood she was underage. Both times he confirmed he did.
He was then told to meet her in Bloomington. But instead of a teenager, he walked into a room full of officers waiting to arrest him. When they grabbed him, he tried to pull rank by saying, “I’m ICE, boys.” The cops basically said that didn’t mean anything. They made it clear that plenty of Homeland Security workers do their jobs the right way, but Back was not one of them. Instead of helping send people to federal authorities, he might be meeting some of those authorities himself for very different reasons.
What really shocked people was his belief that his job would somehow protect him. He acted like being part of ICE would make everyone look the other way. And frankly, given some of the cruel things ICE has been caught doing, this might not even be the worst thing Back did in a normal workday. Working in an environment where people are treated harshly every day can twist your sense of right and wrong.
Either way, his career is gone, his freedom is on the line, and his marriage is very likely falling apart. His wife just recently married him, and now she has to find out he was trying to meet an underage girl. And honestly, ICE shouldn’t act surprised. When you run an agency built on fear and cruelty, you shouldn’t be shocked when people with rotten morals show up to fill the jobs.