The ICE Propaganda Campaign Goes Into Overdrive

MAGA commentators are stepping up as soldiers in Trump’s culture war to provoke confrontations against “Antifa” with the backing of DHS.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Twitter)

TWO WEEKS AGO, THE X ACCOUNT for the Department of Homeland Security was being, all things considered, relatively normal.

There was a repost of a video about law enforcement at the Charlie Kirk memorial, a video on how the Secret Service had dismantled a digital network that could have carried out attacks near the United Nations General Assembly, a video of part of Trump’s tone-deaf, chest-beating speech at the U.N., and posts and news updates on the Dallas ICE field office shooting that left two immigrant detainees dead. The account did not shy away from making overtly partisan arguments—they claimed rhetoric from Democrats demonizing ICE agents had contributed to the shooting—but even in this, it was operating within expected parameters.

Then things took a turn.

Over the past week and a half, @DHSgov has amped up the rate, intensity, and belligerence of its content, posting or reposting nearly two dozen highly produced videos in that time. There were videos about the administration’s plans to forcefully impose order on Chicago, then Portland, by putting down violent protests by anarchists. There was also an attention-grabbing propaganda campaign, produced in coordination with MAGA commentators, meant to ensure the administration’s narrative about immigration reached even larger audiences.

The full canon of footage has made evident one of the defining features of the president’s deportation campaign: He wants it publicized far and wide, literally shouted from rooftops, and in ominous tones. It’s not enough to round up and detain those here illegally, video of it must be shot, edited, dramatized, and disseminated. ICE isn’t just doing immigration enforcement, it is now firmly in the content creation business.

Much of this seems geared toward maintaining the narrative that Trump used to justify his planned deportation ramp-up during his campaign last year: that the goal has always been simply to remove the most violent criminal interlopers from the United States.

But it also provides insight into the way this administration views modern political warfare. The Trump team wants to swarm the information ecosystem with media of its own, knowing full well that they are competing with other videos, often shot by average citizens, that depict the nasty underbelly of ICE’s operations. Some Democratic lawmakers have even gone so far as to argue that the administration is proactively creating footage as a means to justify more aggressive operations.

DHS’s aggressive media-generation efforts come at a time when there are increasing questions about its mission. It’s not just an electorate that’s wondering why prices are still sky high. It’s also voters who are curious as to why the administration apparently has less and less to show for ICE’s staggering recent injection of $45 billion, which made it the best-funded law enforcement agency in the nation.

The administration has responded by depicting ICE as a noble, patriotic, singleminded agency whose agents are cast in heroic, Sicario-like scenarios of daring and risk. The videos they produce show those agents rappelling onto building rooftops from helicopters, deploying flash-bang grenades, and so forth, each bit of footage implying that overwhelming force is necessary.

But simply producing cinematic footage is not enough. DHS has also turned to MAGA’s strongest soldiers in the culture wars to help them spread it. And those right-wing influencers, in turn, have focused their efforts on one platform: Elon Musk’s X.

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Perhaps the clearest distillation of this strategy came during recent protests outside an ICE facility in Portland. While a tense scene played out on the ground, several incendiary right-wing influencers and media figures—Nick Sortor, Katie Daviscourt, Honey Badger Mom, and Julio Rosas—were stationed on the building’s rooftops. They were there not just to watch but to record as well—a bird’s-eye view of the scuffles breaking out below.

Clad in a black protective vest inscribed with the word PRESS, Rosas was filmed sipping what appeared to be an orange Jarritos while bantering with acquaintances. Hydration choices aside, these commentators had a clear purpose: advancing the story that ICE—and Trump—wants. When Daviscourt went on Fox News sporting a black eye that she said she received from Antifa protesters who hit her with a flagpole, she was doing just this, subtlety be damned. And when the right-wing website she works for tweeted out a slick compilation of Daviscourt’s footage depicting Portland as a war zone in which what Trump calls “paid terrorists” were antagonizing brave law enforcement officers, the tweet noted that the video had been produced and posted by the White House. The fact that they were part of a propaganda operation could not have been stated more explicitly.

This was not the only time that flagpoles have played a role in the pro-ICE media campaign emanating from Portland. Sortor snatched an American flag away from protesters trying to burn it; Fox News reposted the moment on TikTok, where it received 218,000 likes and nearly 10,000 comments. Sortor soon regaled MAGA-friendly interviewers with the story of the flag later being stolen from him, and his brave decision to get it back. He said Trump, who signed an executive order to stop desecration of the flag, supports his actions.

“Trump has my back on this,” he said, adding that the president “texted me and said ‘Let me know what I can do, you have my full support.’”

Sortor wasn’t just walking around with an American flag like some sort of misplaced Boy Scout troop leader. He was looking for confrontations with protesters he claims are Antifa. This behavior got him into some trouble with local law enforcement: He was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct before being released on his own recognizance. Video has since come out that shows Sortor pushing a woman of color before being separated by bystanders.

In case you’re wondering how this escalation is playing out, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has said Trump’s use of the military in American cities is part of his authoritarian march, while Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson called this week for “ICE-free zones.” Trump on Wednesday morning said they should both be jailed.

But Sortor and his peers aren’t just in the middle of the scrums, they have become vectors for distributing the footage of them, both posting it to their channels or accounts and then appearing on adjacent media networks to talk about it.

Miles Taylor, the former Trump chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security who in 2018 penned a famous anonymous New York Times piece about anti-MAGA resistance within the administration, told me that it’s been clear to him for years that Trump benefits from this feedback loop. It allows the administration to establish a narrative of left-wing domestic terrorism to provide a pretext for invoking emergency powers and bringing the military into cities that oppose him.

“The folks at the White House were very disappointed that the entrance into L.A. in June didn’t provoke more violence,” Taylor said. “I genuinely think that was their intent, they saw that deployment sputter, and were hoping to create the pretext for a more extensive crackdown because they thought going into the Hispanic neighborhoods of L.A. was one of the most provocative things they could do. . . . What they didn’t have was the thing that they wanted, like they saw in Portland in 2020, which were protests that did grow unruly and out of control.”

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Kristi Noem’s Own Personal Baghdad Bob

WHILE THE CURRENT friendly media and influencer campaign has reached new levels of intensity, some aspects of it aren’t exactly new. Early in Trump’s term, immigrant rights advocates were shocked and confused to see Dr. Phil showing up at ICE raids and doing sympathetic interviews with Tom Homan as the L.A. deployment began. On TikTok, influencer Tyler Oliveira posted an ICE ridealong in June titled “I Deported Illegal Immigrants With ICE!” The video, which he crossposted to all of his social media channels, has 410,000 views on TikTok, 269,000 on Instagram, and 2.6 million views on YouTube. For Trump’s deportations-obsessed administration, the benefits of this kind of close coordination should be obvious.

And as for its own content creation, DHS has been posting YouTube shorts since early this year depicting some of the arrestees they deem the worst of the worst. These clips routinely get hundreds of thousands of views each.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has even found her own personal Baghdad Bob. MAGA commentator Benny Johnson has taken to following her around gleefully lapping it up as she surveys immigration enforcement operations, rails against liberals, and chastises Democratic leadership. He recently posted a video in which he sympathetically framed her attempt to visit a public building in Illinois to give her team a bathroom break. (The DHS group was turned away at the door.) The video invested the abortive pee break with such gravity that it seemed as though Johnson was trying to evoke cultural memories of civil rights pioneers being denied service at segregated lunch counters in the 1950s, or maybe even Mary and Joseph being told there was no room at the inn.

Johnson’s latest fawning Noem post, as of this writing? Noem—on a roof, of course—staring down an “army of Antifa and a guy in a chicken suit.” In a further post sharing a Fox segment that incorporated his clip, Johnson called Noem’s hostile banter with the protesters far below “Straight savage.”

In terms of reach and engagement, this is a step up from the right’s media operation during the ramp-up of the so-called Operation Midway Blitz in September, which featured right-wing influencer Ben Bergquam on ridealongs during ICE raids.

Andrew Herrera, who handles communications for the immigration arm of the Chicago advocacy group the Resurrection Project, told me that in moments of genuine confusion about the actions of DHS agents and protesters—as when CBP claimed that a woman they shot five times had aggressively driven towards them, a version of events that reportedly conflicts with body-camera video—right-wing agitators have proven eager to amplify and corroborate the government’s lies.

“When you have right-wing influencers jump in and boost it, it gives it a veneer of credibility,” Herrera told me. “If you’re in the right-wing ecosystem, you see 40 accounts boosting it, which makes it feel more real. You’re laundering the truth by putting a lie out there and having it repeated by so many quote-unquote ‘independent’ sources.”

Herrera likened it to a version of a social media brand partnership program, where a company gives influencers exclusive content for their feeds that their followers will eat up. But instead of selling skincare products, the influencers are selling government propaganda.

“Provocateurs are a thing people in power have used forever,” Herrera said. “You get the mob riled up, someone throws the first stone, and it justifies an extremely violent government response. Let’s not forget: We have a WWE president, and all this theater and pageantry is something he has excelled at throughout the years. Kash Patel: He’s a performer. Hegseth: He’s a performer. People leading a lot of these agencies are performers. Everything we’re seeing is a performance, but with real guns and destroying real people’s lives.”