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Under Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone on an explicitly fascist zag as it seeks to recruit 10,000 additional U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Robert Reich and others have detailed in recent weeks how ICE is now actively seeking to recruit extremist young men from gun shows, Ultimate Fight Club venues, rodeos, martial arts centers, and other haunts for men who tend to have a far right political vision.
ICE is actively employing recruiters who use right-wing social media and influencer operations to get at potential recruits. And it is explicitly targeting young men who listen to “patriotic” (in other words, hard-right) podcasts. Part of ICE’s “wartime recruitment” schtick now involves asking potential applicants if they want to repel “foreign invaders” — and then offering them $50,000 sign-up bonuses if they decide to join.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has, over the past year, researched the increasingly extreme language and imagery used in these recruitment campaigns. They include a “Your Country Needs You” poster of Uncle Sam, from August of last year, in which Uncle Sam asks “Which way, American Man?” One arrow points to “Invasion,” another to “Cultural Decline,” while a third points toward Uncle Sam and reads “Homeland.”
ICE is now actively seeking to recruit extremist young men from gun shows.
Another shows a father-son combo, both with features that the Nazis would have deemed acceptably “Aryan,” clad in body armor and holding assault rifles, with the caption “No Age Cap. Join ICE Now.”
Still another Uncle Sam recruitment poster from the summer reads, “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.” Other recruitment posters include a photo of a spacious family van, alongside the words “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys? Think about how many criminal illegal aliens you could fit in this bad boy!”
A recent poster, shot from above, shows knights in armor, swords in both hands, in a circle, sword tips pointing inward, and a decal “THE ENEMIES ARE AT THE GATE. JOIN.ICE.GOV.” The agency is also using memes from popular video games to further their recruitment efforts.
Meanwhile, on January 9, DHS and the White House posted a recruitment video on Instagram titled “We’ll have our home again,” accompanied by a visual image of a heroic-looking cowboy riding along the base of snow-covered mountains, and the Pine Tree Riots song “We’ll have our home again,” which has, according to The Intercept, become increasingly popular within neo-Nazi subcultures.
ICE’s “wartime recruitment” schtick now involves asking potential applicants if they want to repel “foreign invaders” — and then offering them $50,000 sign-up bonuses.
The chorus to this truly appalling song is “Oh by God we’ll have our home again/ By God we’ll have our home/ By blood or sweat, we’ll get there yet/ By God we’ll have our home.” The verses lament that “in our own towns, we’re foreigners now/ Our names are spat and cursed.” And they decry the fate of “noble sons driven down beneath a coward’s heel.” Not surprisingly, these lyrics are beloved by Proud Boys and other extremists — and now, apparently, by recruitment officers and propagandists at ICE.
Not to be outdone, the U.S. Department of Labor recently released on Facebook the following message: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American” — a phrase that strongly echoed a slogan used within Nazi propaganda.
In many of these instances, the visual and audio similarities to Nazi wartime messaging is stark. ICE is using World War II recruitment memes; but it has inverted their meaning, so that classic American symbols, from Uncle Sam to the Statue of Liberty, are being invoked in service of a fanatical vision of purity and oneness.
In the wake of the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7, the increasingly extremist agency has refused to modify its behavior or rhetoric.
The circumstances of Good’s killing were particularly egregious: she was shot at least four times by agent Jonathan Ross, who shouted “fucking bitch” as he fired at her while she was clearly trying to drive away from the protest; and her reputation was subsequently slimed by Noem, Donald Trump, JD Vance, and other high-level administration officials who all accused her, without evidence, of being a paid agitator and a domestic terrorist. Those officials then doubled down and, even before any investigation had been carried out, claimed, as Vance put it, that Ross had “absolute immunity” for his actions on the streets of Minneapolis. To protect Ross’s impunity, the FBI, under the egregious leadership of Kash Patel, has refused to share evidence with state investigators.
As anti-ICE protests spread, if anything, its parent organization DHS is upping the ante: days after the killing of Good, the department surged an additional 1,000 agents into Minneapolis, and the Department of Justice is moving federal prosecutors from around the Midwest into Minnesota to faster process the prosecution of protesters.
None of this has been conducive to assuaging growing national anger about ICE’s tactics — tactics that even MAGA luminary Joe Rogan opposes: Rogan recently described Trump’s ICE as behaving like “the Gestapo.”
The visual and audio similarities to Nazi wartime messaging is stark.
Each day since Good’s killing, the protests have grown, only to be met with the deployment of masked, armed federal agents in military uniforms who have turned parts of Minneapolis into what looks like a war zone; and last week, on the same day that ICE agents shot another Minneapolis resident, this time non-fatally, Trump declared that he was leaning toward invoking the Insurrection Act so as to bring in active-duty military personnel to target the protesters.
Trump and his anti-immigrant wingman Stephen Miller seem to want to turn urban centers of the United States into permanent war zones, akin to Belfast during the Northern Irish “Troubles,” or the West Bank today.
DHS’s explicit use of neo-Nazi references and imagery to recruit new agents for its rapidly expanding ICE force is a grim warning of where we are headed.
The scramble to pack ICE with far right recruits and instill in them a sense of total impunity risks pushing ICE toward becoming an organization similar to the Black and Tans in Ireland a little over a century ago — a group of British ex-soldiers who were hired by the British administration in Ireland to dole out death and torture against Irish civilians, raining down terror on public events and private homes alike in their effort to keep Ireland under the British imperial thumb.
As ICE deploys its forces to occupy immigrant neighborhoods of big, Democratic-run cities, its tactics resemble the way Israel polices Palestinians — ruthlessly and violently, with a nod-and-a-wink to civilian and military officers who know they will be exonerated if they shoot civilians. In both cases, the occupying police forces are quick to use baseless accusations of “terrorism” to justify their violence.
The day after Good was killed by ICE, DHS Secretary Noem spoke from a platform bedecked with the message “One of ours, all of yours,” seemingly implying that, in violation both of the law and of age-old moral codes, her department endorses collective punishment.
This is the U.S. in 2026. If there is an afterlife, I’m sure Joseph Goebbels, master propagandist of the Third Reich, is looking down and smiling, thin-lipped and cold-eyed, with approval.
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