ICE’s New-Age Propaganda
With its string of “wartime recruitment” ads, often featuring pop songs and familiar meme formats, the agency has weaponized social media against itself.
For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.
Late last year, the White House’s social-media team lauded ICE’s torrential deportation efforts with a string of memes seemingly engineered to go viral. In one video posted to Instagram, the song “all-american bitch,” by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a montage of deportees being forced onto buses and planes; in another, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” plays as ICE agents accost people in the streets, the lyric “Have you ever tried this one?” repeating each time a new person is detained. Another video uses the satirical song “Big Boys,” from a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring SZA, as agents handcuff people in parking lots. A line from the song—“It’s cuffing season”—flashes in all caps across the screen. Rodrigo, Carpenter, and SZA have denounced the videos as “hateful,” “evil,” and “peak dark,” respectively. (In response to Carpenter, the White House doctored a video promoting her own “S.N.L.” appearance to make it seem as if she said she would “arrest” the cast member Marcello Hernández for being “too illegal.”) Unlike other cases of Trump using musicians’ songs, against their will, at rallies or in campaign materials—Beyoncé, Adele, and Jack White, among them—these videos are not one-off inanities or easily ignorable promotional assets. Instead, they are part of a hundred-million-dollar “wartime recruitment” effort, according to an internal document obtained by the Washington Post, aimed at hiring thousands more deportation officers in the new year, a propaganda crusade intended to portray ICE as a team of Avengers valiantly defending American soil from a malevolent foreign terror. By splicing pop songs and familiar meme formats into cruel detainment footage, ICE strains to attract a younger demographic, hoping to convince people that the agency is a vibrant—and trollishly funny—organization engaged in the noble work of putting away bad guys. Oh, the pop stars got mad? Joke’s on them. Now even more people know ICE is hiring.
The Trump Administration has pledged to deport a million immigrants each year during the President’s second term—even, it appears, if the immigrants have not committed crimes or are lawfully residing in the U.S. This past summer, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress increased ICE’s budget to more than a hundred and seventy billion dollars across the next four years, netting out to an annual allocation that is more than the combined yearly budgets of all local and state law-enforcement agencies in the country. ICE has used some of this money to go on a hiring spree; the agency recently announced that it had signed up twelve thousand new officers and agents—a hundred-and-twenty-per-cent increase to its workforce.
Some of these new ICE agents may have been lured in by the ads running on national television, or by the promotional content appearing on social-media sites and streaming services. On platforms such as Hulu, HBO Max, Snapchat, Spotify, and YouTube, pre-roll and automated ads have begun popping up with alarming frequency. “Join the mission to protect America,” a narrator says, in one recent ad that appeared on Spotify. In another ad specifically targeting local law-enforcement officers in Chicago, an apocalyptic vision of America is reinforced: “You took an oath to protect and serve, to keep your family, your city, safe. But in sanctuary cities, you’re ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals walk free.” According to the internal document obtained by the Post, ICE hopes to target prospective hires through location-based marketing tactics like geofencing, a technology that allows the agency to send ads to the phones of people in specific locations, such as college campuses, gun and trade shows, military bases, and Nascar races. ICE has also allotted funds for right-wing influencers and streamers to promote hiring efforts, and flooded official Department of Homeland Security and ICE social-media feeds with memes. “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” one graphic posted to X and Instagram reads; another image shows a classic car parked on a beach with the header “America After 100 Million Deportations.”
The U.S. government has, of course, never been shy about its spending on defense advertising. In 2023, the Department of Defense’s total advertising budget was $1.1 billion, with the bulk of the funds being directed to military-recruitment efforts; in 2025, the Army’s advertising budget alone surpassed a billion dollars. Still, what makes the D.H.S.’s spending on ICE advertising so disorienting is not only how the agency is being branded as another branch of the military—a domestic war organization hellbent on eradicating a rival militant force—but how it has weaponized social media and digital culture against itself, a somewhat novel strategy for a governmental department. Traditional military calls to action, sometimes combined with white-supremacist tropes, are being deployed in the many memes and A.I.-generated images that the D.H.S. and the White House post daily to TikTok, X, and Instagram, such as Uncle Sam beckoning prospective recruits to save the country, or a nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny painting captioned with the slogan “A Heritage to Be Proud Of, a Homeland Worth Defending.” Anxieties about the border are hardly new, but they have been embellished to dangerous, deranged degrees during Trump’s second term. To declare war on immigrants, many of whom are fleeing persecution and violence fomented by past American interventionism, requires a powerful, blinding narrative strong enough to smokescreen the degradation and dehumanization at the core of the messaging. “The light will defeat the dark,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, declared at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, in September. “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.” Protect the homeland. Remove the invaders. Destroy the aliens. The dog whistles have turned into fire alarms.
Trump’s time in office has obliterated the pretense that there’s any meaningful separation between the state and corporate interests. The decisions and forces that affect society, that dictate the livelihoods and well-being of its citizens, are at the mercy of the market, and the now frighteningly transparent ways that the market serves and benefits its dutiful governmental benefactors. Trump, conflating his politics with capitalist preponderance, has realized that to further his political and economic power, he must activate the state’s most powerful asset: the War Department. Threatening to occupy Greenland. Overthrowing the Venezuelan government and laying claim to its oil reserves. And, crucially, deploying the National Guard into U.S. cities, declaring a domestic war against a fabricated enemy: those who have altered the imagined portrait of the American pastoral.
When defenders of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies cite the possibility of legal immigration, they, too, are perpetuating the reality that market supremacy has usurped legislative processes. For working-class and poor people in developing countries, there are limited options to attaining legal status in the U.S. But if a person seeking status is already wealthy or attains corporate sponsorship, for instance, a viable pathway to citizenship opens up, even if only slightly. This prioritization of wealth is no better articulated than in the launch of Trump’s “gold card,” a literal card with Trump’s face on it that, for a million dollars, grants a foreign-born purchaser a visa and a fast track to citizenship. These are the people the Administration believes deserve entry into the country; most anyone else, apparently, is deemed an enemy of the state. ICE’s “wartime recruitment” ads also, paradoxically, prey on those who are struggling to find a way to survive within the bottlenecked economy, people for whom the stable annual salary provided by a job with ICE, and a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus, would surely improve their quality of life. The agency also promises a path toward meaning, a heroic call to “fulfill your mission.” The fantasy of fulfillment, the dream of belonging—something the so-called enemy is plenty familiar with. ♦