ICE’s New-Age Propaganda

For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling successful for Kyle Chayka.

Late past year, the White House’s social-media squad lauded ICE’s torrential deportation efforts with a drawstring of memes seemingly engineered to spell viral. In 1 video posted to Instagram, the opus “all-american bitch,” by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a montage of deportees being forced onto buses and planes; successful another, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” plays arsenic ICE agents accost radical successful the streets, the lyric “Have you ever tried this one?” repeating each clip a caller idiosyncratic is detained. Another video uses the satirical opus “Big Boys,” from a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring SZA, arsenic agents handcuff radical successful parking lots. A enactment from the song—“It’s cuffing season”—flashes successful each caps crossed the screen. Rodrigo, Carpenter, and SZA person denounced the videos arsenic “hateful,” “evil,” and “peak dark,” respectively. (In effect to Carpenter, the White House doctored a video promoting her ain “S.N.L.” quality to marque it look arsenic if she said she would “arrest” the formed subordinate Marcello Hernández for being “too illegal.”) Unlike different cases of Trump utilizing musicians’ songs, against their will, astatine rallies oregon successful run materials—Beyoncé, Adele, and Jack White, among them—these videos are not one-off inanities oregon easy ignorable promotional assets. Instead, they are portion of a hundred-million-dollar “wartime recruitment” effort, according to an interior papers obtained by the Washington Post, aimed astatine hiring thousands much deportation officers successful the caller year, a propaganda crusade intended to represent ICE arsenic a squad of Avengers valiantly defending American ungraded from a malevolent overseas terror. By splicing popular songs and acquainted meme formats into cruel detainment footage, ICE strains to pull a younger demographic, hoping to person them that the bureau is simply a vibrant—and trollishly funny—organization engaged successful the noble enactment of putting distant atrocious guys. Oh, the popular stars got mad? Joke’s connected them. Now adjacent much radical cognize ICE is hiring.

The Trump Administration has pledged to deport a cardinal immigrants each twelvemonth during the President’s 2nd term—even, it appears, if the immigrants person not committed crimes oregon are lawfully residing successful the U.S. This past summer, arsenic portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress accrued ICE’s fund to much than a 100 and seventy cardinal dollars crossed the adjacent 4 years, netting retired to an yearly allocation that is much than the combined yearly budgets of each section and authorities law-enforcement agencies successful the country. ICE has utilized immoderate of this wealth to spell connected a hiring spree; the bureau precocious announced that it had signed up 12 1000 caller officers and agents—a hundred-and-twenty-per-cent summation to the agency’s workforce.

Some of these caller ICE agents whitethorn person been lured successful by the ads moving connected nationalist television, oregon by the promotional contented appearing connected social-media sites and streaming services. On platforms specified arsenic Hulu, HBO Max, Snapchat, Spotify, and YouTube, pre-roll and automated ads person begun popping up with alarming frequency. “Join the ngo to support America,” a narrator says, successful 1 caller advertisement that appeared connected Spotify. In different advertisement specifically targeting section law-enforcement officers successful Chicago, an apocalyptic imaginativeness of America is reinforced: “You took an oath to support and serve, to support your family, your city, safe. But successful sanctuary cities, you’re ordered to basal down portion unsafe illegals locomotion free.” According to the interior papers obtained by the Post, ICE hopes to people prospective hires done location-based selling tactics similar geofencing, a exertion that allows them to nonstop ads to the phones of radical successful circumstantial locations, specified arsenic assemblage campuses, weapon and commercialized shows, subject bases, and Nascar races. They’ve besides allotted funds for right-wing influencers and streamers to beforehand ICE hiring efforts, and flooded authoritative Department of Homeland Security and ICE social-media feeds with memes. “Want to deport illegals with your implicit boys?” 1 graphic posted to X and Instagram reads; different representation shows a classical car parked connected a formation with the header “America After 100 Million Deportations.”

The U.S. authorities has, of course, ne'er been shy astir its spending connected defence advertising. In 2023, the Department of Defense’s full advertizing fund was $1.1 billion, with the bulk of the funds being directed to military-recruitment efforts; successful 2025, the Army’s advertizing fund unsocial surpassed a cardinal dollars. Still, what makes the D.H.S.’s spending connected ICE advertizing truthful disorienting is not lone however the bureau is being branded arsenic different subdivision of the military—a home warfare enactment hellbent connected eradicating a rival militant force—but however it has weaponized societal media and integer civilization against itself, a somewhat caller strategy for a governmental department. Traditional subject calls to action, sometimes combined with white-supremacist tropes, are being deployed successful the galore memes and A.I.-generated images that the D.H.S. and the White House station regular to TikTok, X, and Instagram, specified arsenic Uncle Sam beckoning prospective recruits to prevention the country, oregon a nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny coating captioned with the slogan “A Heritage to Be Proud Of, a Homeland Worth Defending.” Anxieties astir the borderline are hardly new, but they person been embellished to dangerous, deranged degrees during Trump’s 2nd term. To state warfare connected immigrants, galore of whom are fleeing persecution and unit fomented by past American interventionism, requires a powerful, blinding communicative beardown capable to smokescreen the degradation and dehumanization astatine the halfway of the messaging. “The airy volition decision the dark,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House lawman main of staff, declared astatine Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, successful September. “We volition prevail implicit the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot ideate what they person awakened.” Protect the homeland. Remove the invaders. Destroy the aliens. The canine whistles person turned into occurrence alarms.