President Donald Trump’s ICE is newly flush with cash and straining to add more officers to its masked ranks. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is papering social media with recruitment ads, flooding them onto local news stations in so-called sanctuary cities, talking up signing bonuses (up to $50,000 paid out over three years) and student debt repayment programs (up to $60,000). They want people to know they’re looking for new faces.
ICE is not the only controversial agency that needs to recruit. The police need to recruit, corrections officers need to recruit, the military needs to recruit. But right now, ICE might be the most politically charged and disliked of all of them. And the story ICE is telling in those ads is markedly different from the story you see in contemporary military recruitment.
Military recruiting ads tend to sell you a character arc: You have unused potential, and the military will bring it out of you and transform you into a hero. You’re joining the military for America, yes, but you’re also joining for yourself, in a sort of intensified version of the American dream. America is a country where people have the freedom to be great, and the military will give you the tools and the discipline to truly make your greatness happen. That’s why the famous army slogan is “Be all you can be.”
ICE ads are doing something different. Here’s the story ICE is telling about America and itself as it tries to sell itself to the more than 10,000 new recruits it plans on bringing on before the end of the year.
America was greatest during your (millennial) childhood, which we will restore to you
Most of ICE’s recruitment ads look as though someone typed “WWII aesthetic retro” into an AI image generator. They feature that ruddy ’40s wartime color palette, cartoonish square-jawed men and sharp-eyebrowed women, stern Uncle Sam.
The vintage look helps these ads cultivate the nostalgic vibe they frequently turn to, alongside frequent calls to “recapture the America your forefathers created.” Sometimes, however, the implication is not just that America was great at some point in the hazy past, but that it was greatest specifically during your childhood, when your life was uncomplicated and your mother cooked your breakfast.
In one ad, ICE calls for viewers to “recapture our national identity” over a still image of a 1992 Apache helicopter flyover of a NASCAR race, a callback to the millennial childhood of the 30-somethings they’re looking to recruit. Here, our “national identity” becomes not just loud machines going boom, but specifically the experience of being a ’90s kid. If you join ICE, the implication goes, it will restore the purity of your childhood innocence to you.
Now, America is being invaded, and this is a holy war
Why has America lost its way since your childhood? And what is your role?
In the story ICE tells, you join up to be a hero, but, unlike with the military, you’re not going through any kind of hero’s journey. You already have the stuff. (Maybe that’s why you don’t get that much training?) The real story here is all about how America has changed — it’s being invaded, and you, the hero, must protect her. That’s why ICE’s recruiting slogan is “Defend the homeland.”
“Which way, American man?” asks one caption, in what appears to be a reference to a meme, which is itself inspired by the infamous white nationalist text Which Way Western Man? While the meme is more recent, the book, which dates from 1978, claims there is a Jewish plot against Christians and argues that Adolf Hitler was right. The accompanying illustration on the ICE ad shows Uncle Sam, disheveled, staring at a series of signposts pointing toward “homeland,” “law & order,” versus “invasion,” and, most ominously, “cultural decline.”
“Cultural decline” makes it clear that ICE is not shy about telling its viewers exactly who those invaders are. It’s one of those far-right buzzwords that means, more or less, that immigrants entering America with their own cultures are diluting American culture and making it less vital. The Western culture of classical Greece and Renaissance Europe, the argument goes, is one of humanity’s greatest achievements, and allowing other cultures to amalgamate within it makes it weaken and decay. (Multiple cultures mixing together actually tends to lead to new artistic innovations and a more vital and interesting culture.)
For that reason, these ads are riddled with neoclassical imagery: America pictured as an Athena-like goddess, draped in grecian robes and vowing to fight “for humanity and civilization.” Civilization here is specifically Western and specifically Christian. “Protect our sacred land,” says one ad over a bucolic image of a New England church steeple.
In one recruitment video, Micah Bock, a deputy assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, says: “We know what it means to be an American. Everyone knows what an American is.” He goes on that once the viewer joins ICE, “You’ll block communists, terrorists, and globalists who dilute our culture and import their failed ideologies.”
“Keep criminal illegal aliens out,” says one recruitment ad over a photograph of shifty-looking brown men, one of whom is wearing a turban. “Want to help keep ‘Jihad’ out of America?”” asks an X post. Another post makes it clear that Latinos are an issue, too: “The American people gave us a mandate to rid our country of foreign invaders,” it says, over a photo of a joyous car full of Latino people waving flags for various Latin American countries.
Only real men join ICE
ICE ads depict the agency as the home of uber-masculine, uber-competent men, for whom women are damsels to be protected and prizes to be won.
One ad pictures an ICE agent as a buff shirtless white man, grinning as he denies “communists, terrorists, and globalists” the chance to enter America. America itself is frequently embodied as a helpless woman who must be protected. Another ad shows officers in full gear surrounding a pretty girl who gazes up at them worshipfully. Finally, one ad just focuses on a big car. What could be manlier?
Perhaps ICE thinks it should be the home of all those strapping, big-car-buying Christian white men. Perhaps that’s the kind of person the agency is trying to attract. Regardless, what data we have doesn’t quite match up with the marketing angle.
ICE rarely releases internal demographics. However, as of 2017, roughly 20 percent of its agents were Hispanic or Latino. In 2018, women made up 45 percent of ICE’s workforce. Meanwhile, with a base salary of $50,000 on the low end, it’s unlikely that new recruits can afford one of those big $40,000 cars.
This is your chance to humiliate everyone who annoys you
Trump’s DHS communications office has always had a trollish, sadistic streak to its messaging. It saves its most appalling imagery for the posts it directs at migrants, warning them against entering the country, but a strong undercurrent to its ICE recruitment ads suggests that one of the perks of the job is getting to get violent and to humiliate the people you don’t like.
Notably, that includes not just brown people but also liberal protesters, those uppity elitists who deserve to get taken down a peg or two. One X thread has the URL “join.ice.gov” printed over a series of photos of handcuffed activists with the caption “FAFO,” or “fuck around, find out.”
Another post, captioned, “We’re having an All Night Revival,” shows a video montage of masked ICE officers locked in what looks like street combat with faceless figures, only to emerge victorious through the smoke of flash bombs, escorting handcuffed brown people into their vans. Some of them are shirtless, like the men Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem had posing behind her at CECOT. Meanwhile, the ICE agents themselves are tricked out in combat gear that covers their faces. They are rendered more than human, larger-than-life action heroes.
Everyone’s lost their identity here. There’s nothing on the scale of the individual, only the clash of good vs. evil.
Nothing is serious. Also, everything is serious.
There’s a remarkable defensiveness to the ICE ads, a kind of preemptory don’t take it so seriously, it’s just a joke. How else are you supposed to take a post, after all, that’s just a picture of the Statue of Liberty with flashing red laser eyes?
The “if you get offended you fell for it” posture is one that the alt-right perfected in the years leading up to the first Trump administration, when they used ironic racism as a cover to inject neo-Nazi ideology into more mainstream corners of the internet. “The amount of humor and vulgarity confuses people,” admitted one prominent neo-Nazi. Still, he protested, “The true nature of the movement…is serious and idealistic” — the ideals in question being neo-Nazi ideals.
As the former alt-right crew infiltrates the federal government during the second Trump administration and loses the “alt” label, mainstream Republicans have begun to integrate their trolling 8chan-adjacent meme language into the right’s standard aesthetic — namely, a Norman Rockwell image of classic Americana; American flags waving over a big blonde family eating an apple pie together, while an eagle flies in the distance. This imagery, always on the edge of self-parody, by now carries more than a whiff of insincere piety. It is the imagery of Ronald Reagan, of George W. Bush, of recessions and endless wars, that nevertheless still seems to promise something. It’s an ambivalent aesthetic, which is why it melds so well with that giggling alt-right nihilism.
Combined, the two old aesthetics form a new one in which everything is plausibly a distasteful joke, and so at the same time, everything is serious. When they promise mass deportations: Why are you shocked? You didn’t really take that literally, did you? When they perform mass deportations: Why are you shocked? Don’t you remember they told you they would do it?
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