In this week's Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood replaces Kyle Chayka.
Late last year, the White House social media team praised ICEa tumultuous deportation effort with a string of memes seemingly designed to go viral. In one video posted to Instagram, Olivia Rodrigo's “All-American Bitch” soundtracks a montage of deportees being herded onto buses and planes; in another, Sabrina Carpenter's Juno plays the role ICE agents address people on the streets, the words “Have you ever tried this?” repeated every time a new person is detained. Another video uses the satirical song “Big Boys” from the Saturday Night Live skit featuring SZA as agents handcuff people in parking lots. A line from the song flashes across the screen in capital letters: “Cuffing Season.” Rodrigo, Carpenter and SZA condemned the videos as “hateful”, “evil” and “dark”, respectively. (In response to Carpenter's statement, the White House edited a video promoting her own SNL appearance to make it appear as if she had said she would “arrest” actor Marcello Hernandez for being “too illegal.”) Unlike other cases of Trump using musicians' songs against their will, at rallies or in campaign materials (including Beyoncé, Adele and Jack White), these videos are not one-off stupidity or easily ignored advertising assets. Instead, according to an internal document, they are part of a hundred million dollar “wartime recruitment” program. received Washington Mailpropaganda crusade designed to portray ICE as a team of Avengers valiantly defending American soil from malevolent foreign terror. Combining pop songs and familiar meme formats into brutal arrest footage, ICE tries its best to attract a younger audience, hoping to convince people that the agency is a colorful and trollishly funny organization doing a noble job of apprehending bad guys. Oh, are the pop stars angry? The joke's on them. Now even more people know ICE hires.
The Trump administration has pledged to deport a million immigrants every year during the president's second term—even, apparently, if the immigrants have not committed crimes or are legally residing in the United States. Last summer, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress increased ICEOver the next four years, the US budget will exceed one hundred and seventy billion dollars, resulting in an annual appropriation that exceeds the combined annual budgets of all local and state law enforcement agencies in the country. ICE used some of that money to hire employees; The agency recently announced that it had hired twelve thousand new officers and agents—an increase of one hundred twenty percent.
Some of these new ICE Agents may have been attracted by advertisements airing on national television or promotional content appearing on social media and streaming services. On platforms like Hulu, HBO Max, Snapchat, Spotify, and YouTube, pre-roll and automated advertising have begun to appear with alarming frequency. “Join the mission to protect America,” says the narrator in one of the recent ads that appeared on Spotify. Another ad, specifically targeting local law enforcement officials in Chicago, reinforces the apocalyptic vision of America: “You took an oath to protect and serve, to keep your family, your city safe. But in sanctuary cities, you are ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals are released.” According to internal document received By Mail, ICE hopes to attract potential employees through location-based marketing tactics such as geofencing, a technology that allows the agency to send ads to people's phones in specific locations such as college campuses, gun and trade shows, military bases and Nascar races. ICE also provided funds to right-wing influencers and streamers to promote recruitment efforts and flooded the official Department of Homeland Security and ICE social media feeds with memes. “You want to deport illegal immigrants with your absolute boys?” one image posted on X and Instagram reads: Another image shows a classic car parked on the beach with the caption “America after 100 million deportations.”
The US government has, of course, never been shy about spending on defense advertising. In 2023, the Department of Defense's total advertising budget was $1.1 billion, with most of the funds going toward military recruiting; in 2025, the Army's advertising budget alone exceeded a billion dollars. However, what does DHS spend on ICE What makes the ad so misleading is not only how it positions the agency as just another branch of the military (an internal military organization hell-bent on rooting out a rival fighting force), but also how it has weaponized social media and digital culture against itself, a somewhat new strategy for a government agency. Traditional military calls to action, sometimes coupled with white supremacist tropes, are used in many of the memes and AI-generated images that DHS and the White House post daily on TikTok, X, and Instagram, such as Uncle Sam beckoning potential recruits to save the country, or the nineteenth-century painting Manifest Destiny, captioned with the slogan “A Heritage to Be Proud of, a Homeland Worth Defending.” Concerns about the border are hardly new, but during Trump's second term they were embellished to a dangerous and insane degree. To declare war on immigrants, many of whom are fleeing the persecution and violence fueled by past American interventionism, requires a powerful, blinding story strong enough to mask the degradation and dehumanization at the heart of those messages. “Light will overcome darkness,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, said at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in September. “We will defeat the forces of evil and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.” Defend your homeland. Eliminate the invaders. Destroy the aliens. Dog whistles have become fire alarms.
