It’s no secret that ICE raids are all over the place in the US. It’s also no secret that parents who immigrated to the US are concerned about their children’s well-being in addition to their own, even if their kids are natural-born citizens. So when one student shared what she believes is an ICE questionnaire on TikTok, it further fueled the concern so many people have regarding deportations and detaining.
In her post, the student shared a photo of an “ice breaker” questionnaire from her French class in high school. But the questions, according to some people in the comment section, were more geared toward ICE officials weeding out people to report rather than ice breakers. (See what I did there?) Whether or not the questions had some other, nefarious meaning, it’s hard to deny how they can be taken if you look at them more closely.
The questionnaire has people convinced it’s full of ICE questions for students.
In the student’s post, she writes that the questionnaire she received in French class, which included students asking other kids questions to get to know them better, seemed more like questions meant to “try to find kids to call ICE on.” In another video, she says that she goes to school in Connecticut, rather than a red state like Texas or somewhere else in the South, but she still finds the nature of the questions to be strange.
The questions include asking other students things about other countries they’ve lived in or other languages they speak and adding their names as an answer to a line in front of those questions. Sure, that sounds innocent enough, but let me set the scene a little better for you. One line of the questionnaire says to find a student who “knows the words to America the Beautiful.”
Another wants students to find someone who “has multiple neighbors who are not from the same ethnic group as them.” There are a few others that ask about having parents from another country or having “a name that is frequently mispronounced.”
Things also get political via lines such as “considers themselves a feminist” and “has taken part in a political demonstration.” Then there are more innocent-sounding details to find out about a person, like if they have the same birthday as the other student or if they’re a member of a club or sport.
Maybe those were thrown in just to lighten things up in between questions about immigrant parents and whether the student has ever tried churros. But there are a lot of TikTokers who are unsure of what to make of the questionnaire for a French class in high school, of all things.
“At least your teacher let you know early on that they’re not to be trusted,” someone joked in the comment section. Or maybe that was meant to be totally serious? Honestly, it could go either way.
Someone else more seriously commented, “This is one hundred percent what you think it is. Spread the word — this is what fascism is. This is what authoritarian regimes do.”
