Critics Slam New WTF Ad From ICE: 'They're Literally Copying Third Reich Propaganda'
A new recruitment ad for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has left critics outraged and shocked, as the Americana-themed montage video of midcentury footage features zero people of color — and touts, over a…
A new recruitment ad for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has left critics outraged and shocked, as the Americana-themed montage video of midcentury footage features zero people of color — and touts, over a dulcet ballad, “The way it was. The way it can be.”
“We don’t hate the white nationalism of the Trump administration enough,” wrote one user on X, with another person commenting: “So you are saying you want to make sure there’s only white people in America? Total trash nazis running our government.”
President Donald Trump launched mass deportations after returning to office last year, with enforcement of his unpopular agenda costing multiple Americans their lives and placing skyrocketing numbers of children, including infants, in immigrant detention.
The advertisement released Thursday uses grainy footage that appears to span from the 1930s to 1960s and depicts white Americans on road trips, stopping for Coca-Colas and visiting Mount Rushmore to singer-songwriter Sierra Ferrell’s “American Dreaming.”
It seems to suggest that only a supposedly sacred organization such as ICE can restore America to “the way it was,” despite Trump himself acknowledging in an interview after last week’s midterms blowout that his deportation agenda is “too tough” — and “hurt” his party.
The reactions to Thursday’s video ran the gamut from confusion to outright anger.
Ex-Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin wrote, “Another reason the GOP lost big in the midterms? This is nonsense. Do they realize tens of millions of Americans and voting republicans are descendants of non-white immigrants? It doesn’t make us any less American.”
Most critics slammed the advertisement as propaganda, with immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick calling it “Nostalgiaslop for people who think the U.S. was great when Jim Crow was still around,” and Democratic strategist Maria Cardona going even further.
“This is one of the most offensive, racist, xenophobic, dog whistle for white nationalists propaganda I have ever seen coming out of an official US government account,” wrote Cardona, with one person replying, “It’s obscene - they’re literally copying Third Reich propaganda.”
“ICE recruiting more thugs for its racist Gestapo operation,” wrote journalist Nancy Levine Stearns, with another person understandably asking: “Is [our] federal government just openly posting racist propaganda lol?”
A supervisor overseeing background checks warned last year that ICE was hiring many officers who hadn’t been vetted, and an Economist/YouGov poll from earlier this year showed 58% of Americans who had heard about fatal ICE shootings supported abolishing the agency.
The latest recruitment video sparked widespread pushback from people who’ve had enough.
