On social media, ICE fights a holy war | Religious-themed government videos portray a grim, never-ending battle between us and them

> If you mashed together a Vietnam War epic with a Christian end-times movie, what might emerge is one of the recent social media videos produced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In early July, the department posted a minute-long short showing agents in tactical gear bathed in eerie red light — among them, Homeland Secretary Kristi L. Noem — piling into a helicopter, from which they survey a landscape as if preparing for an aerial attack. The soundtrack is a cover of the 1940s folk tune “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” by the San Francisco rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. As the action unfolds, a man is heard quoting from the Book of Isaiah: “I heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go forth for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’”

> The theme was echoed three weeks later by another DHS video showing murky images of heavily armed agents conducting a nighttime raid on a building. This one is set to a different ominous soundtrack — “I’m the Shadows,” by the electronica act Ryutqc. A line from Proverbs appears: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” A grim voice then recites dialogue from the 2022 film “The Batman”: “They think I’m hiding in the shadows. But I am the shadows.”

> The videos conjure a veritable holy war, in which God’s soldiers prepare to battle evil, a.k.a. undocumented immigrants. These adversaries are largely implied, rendered as shadows visible only through night vision goggles — a stunning bit of dehumanization. As in a lot of propaganda, facts get twisted to fit the message. The quote from Isaiah is wildly out of context. Read the chapters from which it is drawn, and you’ll learn that God was asking Isaiah not to spearhead a masked army, but to warn against profligacy and corruption. “Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor,” reads a verse in Chapter 1, “defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” In other words, nothing to do with a helicopter full of people armed to the teeth.

> What’s perhaps more preposterous is that this video, created by a government agency, violated federal copyright law. In a colorfully worded Instagram post, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club demanded that DHS take down the video for using their music without permission, which is why it now appears partially or wholly disabled on social media platforms.

> These Christian-themed videos are part of a larger barrage of propaganda that clogs the social media feeds of DHS and those of its subdivision Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Log on to their Instagram, X and Facebook feeds, and it is as if someone took humdrum government recruitment ads, marinated them with unhinged 21st-century meme culture, then seasoned them with a bit of Bible and Batman. There are invocations to “Defend your culture!” — along with some rather inexplicable footage of Noem riding a horse in Argentina.

> Stuffed between are countless snapshots of undocumented immigrants apprehended by ICE, their criminal activities lavishly described. (Never mind that more than 70 percent of the nearly 60,000 detainees currently held by the agency have no criminal convictions, according to Transaction Records Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University research group that tracks ICE detentions.) Ultimately, the DHS images are united by a simple idea: that in the United States, some people belong; others do not. And principally, it’s Latino men — largely mestizo or Indigenous in appearance — who are held up as the outsiders.

> Amid the muddle, themes emerge. For starters, you find a lot of Uncle Sam, including adaptations of James Montgomery Flagg’s iconic Army recruitment poster from World War II that reads “I Want You” and shows Uncle Sam pointing at finger at the viewer. This poster, once meant to inspire Americans to fight Nazis, is now being used to enlist them to round up day laborers, construction workers and high school students. One version distributed by DHS carries the caption, “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.” Another incorporates the sherbet-y graphic design of the ’80s television show “Miami Vice” and has the jokey caption, “MIAMI V-ICE!”

> Things get ever more toxic. The 1936 illustration “Which Way to Prosperity?,” by artist Frank Lea, shows Uncle Sam standing at a crossroads where directional signs point to “Inflation,” “Opportunity” and “New Deal.” In his hands, he holds a worn sign for “Prosperity,” its direction unclear — reflecting the grinding economic challenges of the Great Depression. In mid-August, DHS appropriated this graphic for a social media post, altering the signs to read “Invasion,” “Homeland” and “Law & Order.” The caption reads, “Which way, American man?” — which as the New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson has pointed out, echoes the title of “Which Way, Western Man?,” a book by White nationalist William Gayley Simpson. The title has regularly appeared as a catchphrase in trad and alt-right memes, sometimes written as “Which way modern man?”

> Whether DHS’s social media team intended to reference Simpson or merely borrowed a phrase floating around the internet is hard to say. (When queried by NPR, an agency spokesperson issued a nonresponse: “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome.”) But taken as part of what these agencies have been uploading daily — under captions such as “Protect. Serve. Deport.” and “Report All Foreign Invaders” — the dog whistles are loud and clear.

> One running theme consists of wistful images that convey the idea of the United States as a Christian nation rooted in European aesthetics and ideals. As ICE and the National Guard have occupied D.C., DHS has taken to posting vintage illustrations of the city’s neoclassical buildings with captions such as, “American Exceptionalism begins in the nation’s capital.” Before this, the agency posted a reproduction of a painting by Thomas Kinkade showing an idyllic, Victorian-style town in the wake of a rainstorm, a U.S. flag fluttering in the breeze. (This post earned DHS another scolding over intellectual property: The Thomas Kinkade Family Foundation issued a statement declaring that the painting’s use was “unauthorized” and decrying “the deplorable actions that DHS continues to carry out.”)

> The imagery also gets infinitely more pointed. Late last month, DHS shared an image of painter John Gast’s 1872 canvas, “American Progress,” which salutes Manifest Destiny, the concept that European settlers and their descendants had the God-given right to settle the West. The painting shows a White woman in a flowing white gown — an allegorical figure representing the United States — moving westward as she brings forth the telegraph and the steam train. Trying to get out of her path is a small group of Indigenous people. The caption reads: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” (Odd capitalizations, DHS’s.)

> “American Progress” is one of countless works from the era of westward expansion. Famous Western painters such as Frederic Remington and Charles Wimar also created pieces in this vein. Altogether, they present a skewed narrative, heroizing settlers while depicting Native Americans as attackers — rather than as people who were defending their territories. In these depictions, said historian Matthew Baigell in Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Natives were “reassigned the roles of savages and barbarians who blocked ‘progress.’” Stephen Aron, the director of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, which owns “American Progress,” put it simply in an interview with NPR. Gast’s painting, he said, “is a whitening vision of the West.”

!ping IMMIGRATION

What part of “love your neighbor” is hard for these bigots in ICE to understand. What part of the parable of the Good Samaritan or Hell the story of Jesus is hard to understand. Jesus was literally a migrant fleeing persecution at one point. Saint Peter will have a lot of not very nice questions for them at the gates of heaven