01/05/2026
What ICE is rolling out isn’t a hiring campaign — it’s a carefully coded $100 million dehumanization campaign, dressed up as patriotism and sold with the language of war.
Internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post show Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend $100 million in a single year on what officials themselves call a “wartime recruitment” push to hire thousands of new deportation officers.
That phrase isn’t accidental. “Wartime” reframes immigration as an invasion, not a legal or humanitarian issue. It turns people into a threat. (Washington Post, Dec. 2025)
The messaging is blunt if you know what to listen for. Ads and recruitment posts talk about “defending the homeland,” performing a “sacred duty,” and repelling “foreign invaders.”
Immigrants aren’t described as families, workers, or neighbors. They’re framed as a hostile force — something overwhelming, contaminating, and dangerous. This is the oldest propaganda trick in the book: remove humanity first, violence becomes easier later.
What’s new is how it’s delivered. ICE plans to flood social media, streaming platforms, and phones with ads using modern surveillance marketing tools.
Geofencing technology will send recruitment messages to anyone who walks near military bases, gun shows, NASCAR races, UFC events, or college campuses. (Washington Post, Dec. 2025) This isn’t broad advertising. It’s precision targeting, designed to hit specific identities and emotions.
At the same time, Congress has tripled ICE’s enforcement and deportation budget to roughly $30 billion, paving the way for what the Trump administration has openly promised will be the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history — with goals reportedly as high as one million deportations in a single year.
Recruitment ads are paired with dropped age limits and signing bonuses up to $50,000.
Officials are already boasting about the results, claiming hundreds of thousands of applications and calling the campaign “under budget and ahead of schedule.” But civil rights groups and lawmakers are warning that this kind of militarized language attracts recruits who see themselves as combatants, not public servants — a mindset that erodes restraint and accountability.
This isn’t about border policy. It’s about shaping how Americans think.
When immigrants are portrayed as invaders, cruelty starts to feel like defense. History is full of examples where governments used this exact framing to justify mass removals, internment, and worse.
The difference now is that the propaganda doesn’t come on posters — it comes through your phone, your podcasts, your social feeds.
Call it what it is: state-sponsored propaganda designed to make mass deportation feel necessary, heroic, and normal. If we don’t challenge that framing, the policy debate is already lost — because the public has been taught, quietly and repeatedly, who deserves empathy and who doesn’t.
