The Trump administration is planning a massive propaganda campaign aimed at recruiting thousands of new federal immigration enforcement officers to carry out its mass deportation agenda.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that it had obtained internal documents revealing that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to spend $100 million over the next year on what the agency describes as a “wartime recruitment” drive.
The propaganda blitz will be targeted at highly specific demographics, including “people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear,” according to the Post.
The ICE drive would also use an ad-targeting technique called “geofencing” to send recruitment ads to users’ phone browsers if they are in the vicinity of certain locations, such as military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses, and gun shows.
The ads being designed for the recruitment drive will be based around current appeals that depict joining ICE as part of a “sacred duty” to “defend the homeland” from “foreign invaders,” the Post reported.
This rhetoric is similar to the language used in a recent ICE job post flagged by University of Wisconsin–Madison sociologist Jess Calarco. The listing asked prospective recruits if they are “ready to defend the homeland” by joining “an elite team dedicated to … securing our nation’s safety.”
Calarco noted that the job post “reads like a video game ad,” which she said “is almost certainly by design.”
Sarah Saldaña, a director of ICE under the Obama administration, told the Post that it is worrying to see the Trump administration casting such a wide net for people who lack any experience in law enforcement and who may be eager for what the Post described as “all-out combat.”
The recruitment blitz comes amid new indications that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is falling far short of its goals.
The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on Wednesday wrote that immigration arrests this year have fallen far short of the goal of 3,000 people per day set by top Trump aide Stephen Miller, and it seems highly unlikely that Miller will realize his dream of deporting 1 million people per year.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told Sargent that “it’s clear that they have not achieved the shock-and-awe campaign of mass deportations that they wanted, and they are still running into quite a lot of obstacles.”
Reichlin-Melnick also predicted that “there will still be millions of people here who are undocumented” after Trump leaves office in 2028, as the administration “will not be able to deport even the majority of undocumented immigrants in four years.”
The Trump administration earlier in the year announced plans to entice new ICE recruits by offering them $50,000 sign-up bonuses and assistance with repaying student loans in a bid to double the agency’s head count.
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