Clay Jackson is a lawyer who until recently worked for Fidelity National, a Fortune 500 company. He was approached by a friend of an undocumented family who asked for his assistance. He met with them and then:
“A couple days later, on March 6, I was working from home at around 11:30 when I got a notice that my VPN had gone down,” he says. “I didn’t think much about it. It can cut out from time to time. About 10 minutes later, I got a knock at the door.”
Two men were outside Jackson’s door, dressed in slacks and polos. They were not wearing badges.
“I first thought they were going to try to sell me something. But as soon as I opened the door they said, ‘Are you Clayton Jackson?’ I think I shook my head or said ‘yeah,’ and then I heard, ‘We have information that you are obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation.’”
Jackson says alarms went off in his head. “My first instinct was to want to know what this was about. That it must be a misunderstanding. So I started to tell them about how I’ve been involved in some pro bono work. Then this voice in my head kicked in and just said, you need to shut the fuck up — don’t say anything.”
The officers never identified themselves. They did ask if they could come inside.
“I said absolutely not,” Jackson says. “I asked for their names and badge numbers. They said they didn’t have to provide that information at this time. So I told them I’d be calling my lawyer and I shut the door behind me.”
Jackson says his mind started racing. “I needed to know who they were, what agency they were with. Then I remembered that I have the Ring camera. Maybe I could watch the video of the incident and figure out who they were from that.”
There was no video. “That’s when I learned why my VPN had gone down. It wasn’t the VPN. Someone had shut off my Wifi.”
About 15 minutes after the interaction at his front door, Jackson’s Wifi was up and running again.
Scary stuff, and it escalated from there when Jackson was fired by his employer, and wasn’t given a logical explanation:
Jackson first spoke about the incident publicly with Radley Balko, a former Washington Post journalist who described what occurred in a Substack column that was also published April 23 at Slate.com. That same day, Jackson was fired.
ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment. Fidelity declined to discuss why Jackson was fired but acknowledged he no longer works for the company.
“That was not the reason for termination,” Fidelity’s chief legal officer Peter Sadowski said by email Monday when asked if Jackson was fired for speaking with the press about his pro bono plight. “I can’t comment further, given that this is an ongoing employment matter at the company,” Sadowski added.
But here’s a clue as to why he was fired:
Fidelity National’s billionaire chairman, William Foley II, who owns the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights, wineries, and other notable assets, has been a prominent donor to Republican political causes in recent years.
Hmmm.
Be careful out there.
This seems right: