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When helicopters descended on a Chicago apartment building last week with federal agents kitted out in military gear, locals saw a terrifying escalation in the federal government’s incursion into Chicago.
Department of Homeland Security officials saw a cinematic opportunity for a “Call of Duty”-style recruiting video with images from helmet cameras and dramatic music.
Flush with money from Republicans in Congress and on a hiring spree, Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs to recruit a lot of people.
It also wants to send a message to immigrants, as it did with a more traditional international ad campaign earlier this year. The message is stay out of the US and leave if you’re here.
From the DHS side of the camera lens, there are videos like the one with the hunting or military-style tag line “Bag it. Tag it. Take it down,.”
The behind-the-scenes versions are on CCTV, like this post from the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute immigration expert David Bier, a critic of the administration, that shows agents, with a masked photographer in tow, sprinting after unidentified men who had been drinking coffee on the corner.
These videos borrow from the wartime Uncle Sam posters of yore to call for recruits as it has relaxed standards, waiving age requirements and offering a $50,000 signing bonus to bring in new people. And its videos might be intended to entice a certain type of young adult into the federal service.
At the same time, the underlying events behind the videos today could be traumatizing kids, including US citizens, who find themselves on the business end of raids.
“Imagine being a child wakened in the middle of the night by a Blackhawk helicopter on your roof,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker at a news conference on Tuesday, as he complained about federal agents arriving with camera crews in tow.
Not the first propaganda films
The videos also dovetail with a long line of US government wartime propaganda efforts, albeit with a harder edge than Rosie the Riveter. During World War II, the Hollywood director Frank Capra produced a series of “Why We Fight” films in order to boost morale and instill loyalty.
The DHS videos, by contrast, are focused on action inside the US instead of protecting the country from foreign threats.
The videos also make questions about deploying the National Guard in US cities beside the point. There’s already a militarized force on the ground.
CNN Senior National Security Analyst Juliette Kayyem said there is nothing strange about law enforcement recording their activities. Some jurisdictions in fact require the use of body cams. But these videos are different, she said.
“They do not look like police videos,” said Kayyem, who was assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs during the Obama administration. “They look like campaign ones.”
Rather than serve a policing purpose, Kayyem said, the videos seem more designed to “scare communities, pretend like they are fighting a dangerous threat, or, as I suspect, to be used in GOP campaigns.”
When the government trolls
DHS doesn’t just post action movie-style content. It also trolls critics who don’t like the image of masked agents arresting people without warrants in American streets.
When the country singer Zach Bryan published a snippet of a song that seemed to criticize ICE for kicking down people’s doors with the tag line, “the fading of the Red White and Blue,” DHS clapped back at the US Navy veteran by using another one of his songs, “All Night Revival,” as the soundtrack for a montage of its raids.
Bryan has since clarified that he falls on neither of the “radical sides” of the political aisle.
“Everyone using this now as a weapon is only proving how devastatingly divided we all are,” he said in an Instagram story. “We need to find our way back.”
“Please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos”
The DHS social media effort is hip to the social media age, loaded up with guns, “Cops”-style arrests, fit-looking agents in combat gear, and knowing jokes.
One video took out of a context a comment by the comedian and manosphere podcaster Theo Von, who was recorded by a fan saying, “Heard you got deported dude, bye.”
That snippet was used by DHS as the punchline of another video. In his own social media post, Von asked the government to take it down.
“Please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos,” Von said on X. “When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are alot more nuanced than this video allows. Bye!”
Surely the Von controversy only got more eyeballs on the video. A video featuring hard-hitting arrests over the Pokémon theme also got attention. The US government did not seek permission to use the theme, according to Pokémon.
Who is being arrested and deported?
The videos make use of the conservative media ecosystem by tapping influencers for ridealongs.
One recent video shared by the conservative content creator Benny Johnson showed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, apparently talking to a man she identified as a pedophile, driving home the government allegation that they are first targeting criminals for deportation.
But the man being arrested was not identified, making it impossible to verify the story.
When DHS posted a release identifying the “worst of the worst” of the undocumented immigrants arrested in Portland, alleging they were hardened criminals and pedophiles, some of the names did not have Oregon or federal cases associated with their names. Others had recently been in prison, serving sentences.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Their allegations about detainees must be verified, however — especially after allegations about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador for a time earlier this year, turned out to be overstated.
Abrego Garcia is back in the US and the government has charged him with human smuggling, a charge a federal judge said recently may have been brought out of vindictiveness.
Stars of the genre
Abrego Garcia was initially taken to a supermax prison in El Salvador, a place that seems designed to go viral for its harshness, as CNN’s David Culver documented.
The initial transfer of deportees to that prison was the subject of multiple US government videos.
Noem is a frequent star of government deportation videos, including a trip to the El Salvador prison, after which critics accused her of playing to cameras.
Another star of DHS videos is Gregory Bovino, the border patrol chief leading efforts on the ground in Chicago.
During an interview for a recent profile, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez asked him about the videos and social media strategy. Bovino argued they are “so real life they appear to be Hollywood.”
“You think it’s a Hollywood video? That’s real life”
The full exchange is interesting:
ALVAREZ: What is the message you want people to take from the videos and your general presence on, for example, X?
BOVINO: Transparency. Uh, I think the public sometimes doesn’t get transparency. We can go back to that reporter that misquoted me. That wasn’t transparent. That was agenda-driven. This is not agenda-driven. Our social media is designed to give the public a snapshot, a real-time snapshot of what is really happening, whether it’s on the border, or now in Los Angeles and or Chicago, what’s really happening. So they can take a look at that social media, those social media pages, and they’re getting an accurate snapshot of what’s happening. Now you might say, “Hey, that’s Hollywood. That looks like Hollywood.” Well, you know …
ALVAREZ: It’s highly produced.
BOVINO: Well, you know, it’s actually produced — there are Border Patrol agents that produce that. Those are border patrol agents that have learned their craft. Border Patrol agents right off the line — and they learn their craft — that are producing those, but you think it’s a Hollywood video? That’s real life. It might be so real life that it appears to be Hollywood, but a lot of that is real time.
The country, meanwhile, remains divided on the administration’s deportation efforts and tactics. A New York Times/Siena poll released this week found a majority of the country, led by Republicans, favors deporting those here illegally. At the same time, a similar majority thinks the process has been unfair.