The link to the Facebook page of ICE, the U.S. anti-immigration agency, leads to the page of a friendly thirty-year-old Indian man instead of the agency’s official social media property. The young Asian managed to outwit the heavyweights of U.S. security using a very simple trick. A story that seems to confirm the sloppiness of the agency responsible for the brutal killing of two people in the past month and for numerous raids.

Imagine the worst

Even the best make mistakes. Imagine the worst. At the bottom of the ICE website there is a bar with links to social networks. It can be interesting for a reporter to browse these pages to understand an organization’s point of view.

As communication manuals teach, nothing is more disheartening than seeing them empty. It signals neglect and affects how the “brand” is perceived by consumers. The news is full of so-called “epic fails”, which have cost companies dearly in terms of reputation—and sometimes the careers of their social media managers.

If ICE’s Instagram page shows all the agency’s brutality, with mugshots posted online without precaution and captions that seem written by some Ohio farmer, trying to reach the Facebook page is what brings a surprise: you end up on the page of an Indian man, one Punit Saini, apparently a content creator by profession.

Saini lives in Jaipur, India, the capital of the state of Rajasthan, and did something ingenious: he took advantage of the option (offered to everyone by Facebook) to change the name of his personal page. He called it “wwwicegov,” thereby misleading the unwary developer of the ICE website, who took the bait. No one bothered to check, and even the American press failed to notice.

Among religious-inspired images and photos gazing toward the horizon or sitting on a large motorcycle, the young Indian man hit the jackpot.

A matter of method

It would just be funny, if it were not for the fact that ICE—short for Immigration and Customs Enforcement—is known, beyond its harsh methods, for a certain carelessness in its raids. The Trump administration has repeatedly come under fire for deporting people to foreign countries (with which it has signed agreements for this purpose, such as Ecuador) without properly verifying their identities. A doorbell rings, the unfortunate person is taken, and they are put on a plane and sent out of the country.

The oversight on the Facebook page, much like what one would say about a company, appears to confirm ICE’s rough-and-ready methods.

The Indian young man’s prank is somewhat like Mathias Rust’s flight over Red Square in Moscow in 1987: a harmless demonstration, but perhaps effective, in revealing the agency’s slapdash approach—and that of those who inspire it.