Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.
Then last January, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.
Instead, his website has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.
“I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”
What began as a comedy routine has become one of the most viral pieces of social satire during President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. The kindergarten video has been watched more than 20 million times on TikTok and exploded across Facebook, Reddit and YouTube, where one commenter called it “one of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance” they’d ever seen.
Palmer’s methods have fueled anger among some conservatives who argue his deception threatens to obstruct how immigration laws get enforced. While he does not claim to be Immigration and Customs Enforcement, his webpages, which appear in the Google results for ways to report immigrants, use words like “official report” and include a logo resembling the U.S. seal.
Will Johnson, a pro-Trump podcaster and content creator in Texas, said Palmer is “leading people on who think they’re reporting a crime” and that he could go to prison for impersonating law enforcement.
“He’s making people who are reporting people taking advantage of the system look like just bad human beings,” Johnson said in an interview. In cases like the kindergarten video, he added, it may “look bad, but at the same time we are a nation of laws.” (ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.)
But neither Palmer nor the website say they represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)
His supporters have argued the strategy is worth it because it has helped reveal the horrors of America’s immigration crackdown, exposing the moral contradictions and hidden inhumanities of deportation politics — and reaching viewers, through their TikTok and Instagram feeds, who might otherwise be politically disengaged. One commenter said the teacher video showed the “banality of evil personified.”
Kindergarten teacher wants kindergartener deported. Starting new tour soon, be first to get notified of shows in your area: https://benpalmertour.com unposted bits: https://benpalmerpatreon.com
Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor who studies political comedy and saw the video on social media, said Palmer’s satire has been effective because he plays the conversations as straight as possible, letting the caller deliver an unimpeded justification that slowly crumbles under its own weight.
“It creates this uncomfortable irony, where he’s letting the person deliver the argument and it just beats itself, because it’s so morally problematic or hypocritical or wrong,” he said. “You can kind of sense that they think they’re doing the right thing, and then he just repeats what they said, and they kind of realize they’re doing something terrible.”
Palmer’s project, Sienkiewicz said, feels especially distinctive in the short-video era because he does not copy the style of many social media ideologues by “rage-baiting” viewers into an immediate emotional response.
“So much of contemporary internet culture is showing something offensive and telling people how to feel about it,” he said. “It’s his refusal to act enraged that allows the audience to then choose their own level of anger.”
Since Palmer and a web designer launched the sites last year, he has regularly reviewed the filed reports and called the tipsters of any that seem especially notable. He never claims to work as a federal agent or with ICE, he said.
“If they ask, I just start rambling,” he said. In one call posted online, he told a tipster he is affiliated “in a nonaffiliated way with the government,” and that he works “coherently and cohesively with the ISIS.”
After reading dozens of reports, he said he was stunned by how many people seemed driven by personal annoyance. One woman reported the new girlfriend of her ex-husband. Another homeowner reported his neighbor after he used his trash can.
One tipster called after she went to Publix and the worker who helped her find the water didn’t speak English. “And then she did help you find the water?” Palmer asked on the call, to which the woman responded, “Right, she walked me right to it.”
Many of the tipsters spoke as if the government was “their own personal army,” Palmer said. “If these are the calls I’m getting, as a fake, not legitimate person, imagine what’s happening at the actual ICE.”
In the kindergarten call, the teacher said she’d decided to report the student’s parents after looking them up in the school files and seeing that they were born in Honduras and El Salvador. She said the student was born in New York, and was 5 or 6 years old, but that she didn’t like people “taking up resources from our country.”
When Palmer read back her report in a flat tone, she scoffed. “You make it sound terrible,” she said. Later in the call, she asked to speak to Palmer’s supervisor after saying she didn’t like his attitude.
“I can’t help that they have a 6-year-old. That’s on them,” she said.
Palmer’s videos do not identify the tipsters. The Washington Post contacted the woman after Palmer shared her contact information, but she declined to comment.
The call sparked a firestorm on social media, with some saying they were horrified by what one Reddit commenter said was the “genuine lack of empathy and dehumanization so many people display.”
“There is a mirror being placed in front of her, but she doesn’t seem to understand or accept who’s looking back at her,” one Facebook commenter wrote. “The most terrifying part is that ‘polite’ tone she uses the entire time,” a YouTube viewer said.
Dannagal Young, a political communication professor at the University of Delaware, said Palmer’s videos could help reach Americans turned off by politics and uninformed about how deportations work. She noted that immigration, once one of Trump’s most popular policy issues, has become the one area where he’s lost the most support.
“There’s something really powerful about witnessing someone have to reckon with their own moral judgment in the moment, especially because they think they’re calling a welcome receiver, and they think they’re going to be applauded,” Young said.
“He is describing to them the reality of what they’re requesting as though it is completely fine and desirable, and through that calm matter-of-fact representation, it reveals itself to be absolutely inhumane,” she added. “The greatest nightmare for this administration is [normal people] paying attention.”
Palmer has not traditionally performed political comedy in his live shows, where the crowd sometimes skews conservative and he tries not to lean “one way or the other.” But he said he has struggled to come to grips with what the calls have shown him: normal people who, while going about their daily business, decided to potentially upend a stranger’s life.
They tell him they call because they care about documentation, but “that’s not why you’re doing it,” he said. “That’s just the thing you’re telling yourself to make you feel better.”
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