We were all there once upon a time — just a few months out of high school and ready to join the workforce.

That’s the present-day situation for 19-year-old Devin Bradford, a Glennwilde resident who’s quickly come to find out work is hard to come by in Maricopa. Now that he’s engaged to be married with a freshly minted diploma in hand, he’s doing the responsible thing, putting himself out there with hopes to make an honest living.

What he doesn’t want, however, is to make a dishonest living. But that’s exactly the job offer that came his way on Saturday in response to an employment ad posted to a popular and reputable Facebook group exclusive to Maricopa residents.

The offer

“You have a car?” the nebulous employer, identifying himself as Jose Rodriguez, asks Bradford in a string of private messages later shared with InMaricopa. “You can pickup [sic.] people?”

Bradford responds that he can, and questions: “Let’s get to the point … What’s the job? I’m still confused.”

He’s met with an Apple Maps location pin at a shopping plaza on John Wayne Parkway.

“Pickup here. Immigrants,” Rodriguez orders.

Bradford’s answer: “Yeah, I’m good, man. I don’t do illegal work.”

Rodriguez turns up the pressure, probing for why his prospective trafficker isn’t able to complete the job. Bradford stands strong: “Not that I can’t, I won’t. It’s illegal and I don’t want to be involved, respectfully.”

That’s when Bradford blocks Rodriguez’s Facebook account, which has since been deleted. He shared the entire exchange with InMaricopa on Saturday, telling us today that “it was for sure crazy.”

Workers be warned

Amid dubious headlines of Haitian immigrants decapitating ducks and eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio, and with immigration rated the No. 1 issue ahead of November’s presidential election with nearly 300,000 undocumented migrants living in Arizona alone, Bradford urges his neighbors to remain vigilant in rejecting such job propositions.

“I just want to do my part,” he said.

Since April 2022, the governors of Arizona, Florida and Texas have used taxpayer funds to transport more than 10,000 recently arrived migrants from the Southwest border to other states, according to the National Immigration Forum. Gov. Katie Hobbs says her office transports migrants who enter Arizona from Mexico legally with the help of city and county governments, nonprofits and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, not sketchy Facebook job ads.

Transporting an illegal immigrant is a crime in Arizona carrying up to $1,000 in fines, four years of probation and six months in jail for a first-time offender.