In the last year, ICE has doubled in size – which is all part of President Donald Trunp’s agenda to turbocharge the government’s mass deportation efforts.
Key takeaways
- ICE is pursuing a “wartime” recruitment strategy to rapidly expand the agency, using aggressive messaging that draws inspiration from memes and video games.
- Internal documents show the agency is targeting specific audiences through geofenced ads, framing immigration enforcement as a patriotic, combat-like mission.
- Current and former officials warn the campaign’s emphasis on aggression risks attracting poorly vetted recruits and flattening a complex policy issue into a good-versus-evil narrative.
But the agency’s massive push for new agents has led to reportedly poor vetting of applicants and a lowering of the agency’s standards. Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell recently got his hands on an internal ICE document outlining the agency’s recruitment plans for 2026. The agency wants to find 14,000 new ICE employees — on top of the more than 20,000 officers and agents it currently has — by appealing to fans of NASCAR, UFC, and patriotic podcasts. They’re calling it their “wartime recruitment” strategy, and Harwell says the meme-fied and macho tenor of ICE’s online advertisements tell us a lot about who the agency is trying to bring into its fold.
Harwell spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about ICE’s recruitment efforts and what they say about the present and future makeup of the agency.
There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What’s this internal ICE document and what’s in it?
This is an internal confidential document that ICE officers spread to each other that outlines what they call their “surge hiring recruiting strategy.” It lays out $100 million in recruiting spending that they want to pour into social media advertising and real-world advertising.
They want to reach pro-ICE influencers who can get the message out. They want to go to gun fairs, gun shows, hunting shows to reach people — to reach more than 10,000 potential deportation officers, lawyers, and other staffers that can help them carry out this giant deportation that the Trump administration has been promising.
They’ve never done anything like this. If you’ve gone on X or YouTube or Instagram, they have these really patriotic machismo ads that say the “enemies are at the gates,” [that] you need to join ICE to “defend the homeland” and repel these “foreign invaders.”
There’s also these ads that they feel like will appeal to their sense of honor and patriotism and their aggression. A lot of these ads are in the model of video games and action movies, and there are these buff guys with guns who are shutting down the border. So they’re really [giving] this cinematic, patriotic sheen to it all, when really these are government law enforcement jobs. They’ve never been framed in this way.
All right, so they’re blanketing the internet. Then there’s also real life. If I were to come upon one of these ads in real life, where would I be likely to be? Where would I be hanging out if I saw one of these things?
They’ve done “geofencing,” where they’ll actually look at a specific event like a UFC fight or a gun show or a rodeo or a NASCAR race, some event where they feel like their target market is going to be, and they’ll draw a circle around where that real-world event is. And then if you step foot inside that real-world circle, you’re going to get a targeted ICE advertisement telling you to join the agency.
Do they talk openly in this document about the kind of person that they want for ICE?
The big thing they keep going back to is to “patriots.” They keep saying that the people they want are real hardcore border protectors who want to, in their words, “protect the American way of life.” On a lot of these posters, you will see the action movies and the video games. But there’s also a line of marketing in their campaign that uses these very classic nostalgic Americana posters that almost look like wartime propaganda posters, where it’s like old-timey white people on the frontier defending the homeland. Uncle Sam features very heavily in a lot of these.
There’s also ones that use this cowboy imagery to make it like you are on the frontier, fighting these outlaws. One of them says, “Are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed?” and it just speaks to this idea [that] your country is being taken from you by — as all these ads show — brown people, and you have to partner up with your fellow ICE agents to take these people out. And so they’re really kind of appealing to this idea of frustration at a changing America and wanting to pull in people who want to fight that.
You reached out to DHS for comment. What was the response?
We’ve talked to a number of people who are currently inside ICE and DHS who are, to be honest, pretty unnerved and disturbed by how the agency has changed. And so we got a lot of reporting and a lot of documentation out of the agency, and we went to DHS and ICE and told them what we had. They wouldn’t confirm or deny the document, which is pretty classic for them. They wouldn’t dispute any of the claims we had pulled out from it.
But what they said was, we’re thrilled that the Post is highlighting how successful this campaign has been. Their argument has been that this strategy is working. Their goal in the document was to hire 14,000 new people. And so their argument is, this model is working. We’re ahead of schedule, we’re under budget. We’re getting hundreds of thousands of job applications in. We’ve put out 18,000 job offers.
So the patriotism and the machismo and some of the stuff that they’ve been criticised on, they’re very proud of that. They feel like this is an ad campaign that they feel like Americans will support, that they have a mandate from the voters to lead this massive deportation operation. And so yeah, they feel like what they’re doing is right, and they’re proud to do it, and they’re getting all the right people in.
You said that you also spoke to people inside of ICE who are kind of disturbed by this recruiting effort. What did they tell you? What’s their complaint exactly?
ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which was started after 9/11. It has always been a “Let’s protect Americans” agency. Immigration is a component of DHS, but so is protection from a lot of other stuff, right? Cyber attacks, natural disasters. So it’s always been a law enforcement triage operation. And under the Trump administration, it has been made into all immigration, all the time. So they’re frustrated by that, but they’re also kind of unnerved by this campaign and how bold it is.
With this kind of campaign, they feel like they’re going on the internet and basically just saying, “Hey, if you want to pick up a gun and start shoving people around, you want to join us.” And their worry is that this appeal to aggression is going to be getting aggressive people who aren’t trained, who have this idea in their head that they can start being this warrior on the street, when they realize that the reality on the ground should be a lot more nuanced and a lot more careful, because these are real people. These are real people’s lives. This isn’t just a meme.
How is the public responding to being hit with these in the wild and on the internet?
So you’ll see on social media, a lot of people who are already kind of pro-Trump, pro-ICE, are celebrating them as like, “Yeah, let’s really get out there and do this thing.” But you also see a ton of criticism and backlash, like [on] Spotify, where if you’ll be listening to music on the free service, you’ll get a commercial that’ll pop up that’ll say, “Join ICE.” And you can actually see on the Spotify message boards where people are outraged. They’re saying, “I’m going to cancel my subscription. I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to be thinking about this.”
You’ve also seen some of this because of this campaign being so targeted. Part of it is they’re also targeting people to self-deport. So they’re targeting genres of music they feel like will be listened to by people who may not be in the country legally. And so people will be listening to Latin music and they’ll be getting a commercial in Spanish telling them to leave the country, and they just feel very disturbed by that. These commercials are basically finding their ways into a lot of people’s daily lives, and they are angry at the reminder of what’s happening around the country. And so they’re lashing out and they’re saying, any company that’s taking money for this kind of ad campaign, we don’t want to support it.
What did you learn about the imagery that ICE is using in these ads? What is it telegraphing? What is it trying to say?
On X especially, you’ll see a lot of these very edgelord memes. These are like 4chan-style kind of dark jokes about “join ICE.” One of them says “deport illegals with your absolute boys.” And it shows a minivan. And it’s just this joke about “join ICE and you can crack some skulls with your friends.”
And they’re really flattening this conversation around immigration into this video game battle, right? I mean, one of the posters is from the video game Halo and it says, “destroy the flood.” And in it, basically, they’re saying, if you join ICE, you become this super soldier protecting Earth from this flood of aliens, literally. And they’re also making a joke of it.
I think this is the other thing. DHS has been putting out a lot of deportation memes, so has the White House. They’re very common on X. You’ll see them everywhere, and some people get a little laugh out of it, but it’s also pretty disturbing because they’ll end up using images of real people who are being deported out of the country, who may not have a criminal record, but are being called the worst of the worst. And so you see just the level of bile in the discussion around these people, and it just flattens this really nuanced policy issue into, again, this kind of good-versus-evil battle that they’re framing like an action movie or a funny online joke, but is really so much more complicated.
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