Today, Explained - The new ICE army

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

Trump wants to hire a slew of new ICE agents. He's targeting fans of NASCAR, UFC, video games and guns. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Andrea López-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Chicago. Photo by Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

ICE recently undertook a nationwide surge aimed at hiring thousands of agents and summed up by these three lines at ICE.gov slash join. America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need you to get them out. You do not need an undergraduate degree. The frenetic pace is raising some questions about how agents are being vetted. A left-leaning freelance journalist named Laura Jadid said last week that she'd applied for a job at ICE and been accepted, despite having been publicly critical of the agency and her reporting. Not only did the drug test not seem to be a deal breaker,

I appeared to have been offered a final job offer. The truth is, they're taking anyone with a pulse. DHS called her allegation a lazy lie on X, and Jadid replied with a screen grab that appeared to show she had reached the final offer stage. Coming up on today, explained inside the chaos of ICE recruiting, edge lord memes, allegations of Nazi and white nationalist illusions, and zero apologies. Support for the show comes from one past,

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That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash Vox. Vanta.com slash Vox. This is today explained. I'm Noelle King with Drew Harwell. Drew is a tech reporter for The Washington Post who recently got his hands on an internal ICE document on hiring. Drew, tell me what this document is and what's in it. Yeah, so this is an internal, confidential document that ICE officers spread to each other

that outlines what they call their surge hiring recruiting strategy. So it lays out $100 million in recruiting spending that they want to pour into social media advertising, real-world advertising. They want to reach pro-ice influencers who can, like, get the message out. They want to go to gun fairs, gun shows, hunting shows to reach people, just like use every technique they can to hopefully, in their words, reach. you know, more than 10,000 potential deportation officers, lawyers, and other staffers that can help them, you know, carry out this giant deportation that the Trump administration has been promising. I mean, their whole model is to basically blanket the internet with these kinds of ads.

And if you've gone on social media or on some of these other, you know, news websites, you've seen join.e. That's like their portal for getting everybody in. And yeah, $100 million is a ton of money. It's like a big corporate advertising campaign. ICE has never done anything to this scale. They've never done anything like this. And so they're trying, they're trying everything, basically. I mean, if you've gone on X or YouTube or Instagram, they have these really, like, patriotic machismo ads that say, like, the enemies are at the gates. You need to join ICE to defend the homeland and repel these foreign invaders.

September 11th, 2000. So there's nearly 3,000 Americans lost because terrorists were here illegally. From that day, ICE was born. America's first year. So there's a lot of that, but there's also, yeah, like these ads that they feel like will appeal to their, you know, sense of honor and patriotism. And, you know, their aggression, right? A lot of these ads are in the model of video games and action movies and there's these buff guys with guns who are shutting down the border. So they're really making like this cinema.

patriotic sheen to it all when really this is, you know, these are government law enforcement jobs. They've never been framed in this way. All right. So they're blanketing the internet. Then there's also real life. If I were to come upon one of these ads in real life, where would I be likely to be? Where would I be hanging out if I saw one of these things? Yeah. So they've done geo-fencing where they'll actually look at a specific event, like a UFC fight or a gun show or a rodeo or a NASCAR race, some event where they feel like their target market is going to be. And in kind of like this advertising technique, they'll draw a circle around where that real world event is. And then if you step foot inside that real world circle,

if you go to that gun show or that NASCAR race and you pull up your phone, you're going to get a targeted ICE advertisement telling you to join the agency. Do they talk openly in this document about the kind of person that they want for ICE? The big thing they keep going back is to patriots. They keep saying that, you know, the people they want in are real hardcore border protecters who want to, you know, in their words, like protect the American way of life. Defend the homeland. Join ICE now. Deport all foreign invaders. Destroy the flood. Join.org. Join.com. On a lot of these posters, you will see, you know, the action movies and the video games. But there's also a line of, like, marketing in their campaign that uses these very classic, nostalgic, like, Americana posters that almost look like wartime propaganda posters, where it's like, you know, old-time white people on the frontier, defending the homeland, you know, Uncle Sam features very heavily in a lot of these.

There's also ones that kind of use this, like, cowboy imagery to, you know, make it like you are, you know, the lawfighters on the frontier fighting these outlaws. One of them says, are you going to cowboy up or just lay there and bleed? And it just speaks to this idea of, like, your country is being taken from you by, you know, as all these ads show, brown people. And you have to partner up with your fellow ICE agents to take these people out. And so they're really kind of appealing to this idea of frustration out of changing America and wanting to pull in people who want to fight that. Okay, so you say in the story that you reached out to DHS for comment, and DHS told you what exactly when you confronted them and said like,

hey, look, we've got this document. We know what you guys are up to. What was the response? We've talked to a number of people who are currently inside ICE and DHS, who are, to be honest, pretty under. and disturbed by how the agency has changed. And so a part of that was we got a lot of reporting and a lot of documentation out of the agency. And so we went to DHS and ICE and told them what we had.

You know, they wouldn't like confirm or deny the document, which is pretty classic for them. They wouldn't dispute any of the claims we had pulled out from it. But what they said was, you know, we're thrilled that the post is highlighting how successful this campaign has been. Their argument has been that this strategy is working. They, you know, their goal in the document was, we want to hire 14,000 new people. And so their argument is this model is working. We're ahead of schedule.

We're under budget. We're getting hundreds of thousands of job applications in. We've put out 18,000 job offers. So, you know, in their, you know, the patriotism and the machismo and some of the stuff that they've been criticized on, they're very proud of that. They feel like this is an ad campaign that they feel like Americans will support. that they have a mandate from the voters to lead this massive deportation operation. And so, yeah, they feel like what they're doing is right and they're proud to do it and they're getting all the right people in.

But you said that you also spoke to people inside of ICE who are kind of disturbed by this recruiting effort. What did they tell you? What's their complaint exactly? You know, ICE is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which was started after 9-11. And it has always been a let's protect Americans agency. Immigration is a component of DHS, but so is protection from a lot of other stuff, right? Cyber attacks, TSA, FEMA, natural disasters.

So it's always been, you know, a law enforcement triage operation. And under the Trump administration, it has been made into all immigration all the time, right? So they're freshered by that, but they're also kind of a nerve by this campaign and how bold it is. With this kind of campaign, they feel like they're going on the internet and basically just saying, hey, if you want to pick up a gun and start shoving people around, you want to join us. And their worry is that this appeal to aggression is going to be getting aggressive people who aren't trained, who have this idea in their head that they can start being this warrior on the street when they realize that the reality on the ground should be a lot more nuanced and a lot more careful. because, you know, these are real people.

These are real people's lives. This isn't just a meme. Okay, so that's the internal concern. These ads, as you've said, are very, very public. How is the public responding to being hit with these in the wild and on the internet? Yeah, so you'll see on social media a lot of people who are already, you know, kind of pro-Trump, pro-ice are celebrating them as like, yeah, let's really get out there and do this thing. Support your local ice raid. Clap emoji.

Let's go. Keep America safe. But you also see a ton of criticism and backlash like Spotify, where if you'll be listening to music on the free service, you'll get a commercial that'll pop up that'll say join ICE. In too many cities, dangerous illegals walk free as police are forced to stand down. Join ICE and help us catch the worst of the worst. And you can actually see on like the Spotify message boards where people are outraged. They're saying, I'm going to cancel my subscription. I don't want to hear this.

I don't want to be thinking about this. I wanted to inform you that I am canceling my Spotify subscription because my conscience can no longer support a company that plays ICE recruitment ads. You've also seen, you know, some of this, because of this campaign being so targeted, part of it is like they're also targeting people to self-deport. So they're targeting, you know, genres of music they feel like will be listened to by people who may not be in the country legally.

And so people will be listening to, you know, Latin music, and they'll be getting a commercial in Spanish telling them to leave the country, and they just feel rarely disturbed by that. Yeah, that's almost different from the recruiting side of it. But it's just, you know, these commercials are basically finding their ways into a lot of people's daily lives, and they are, you know, kind of angry at the reminder of what's happening around the country. And so they're lashing out, and they're saying, you know,

any company that's taking money for this kind of ad campaign, we don't want to support it. What did you learn about the imagery, that ICE is using in these ads. What is it telegraphing? What is it trying to say? On X especially, you'll see a lot of these very edge lord memes, right? These are like 4chan style kind of, you know, dark jokes about join ICE.

Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys? Join.ice.gov. Think about how many criminal illegal aliens you could fit in this bad boy. Join.com. And, you know, it shows like a minivan. And it's just this like, ha-ha joke about, you know, join ice and you can crack some skulls with your friends. And they're really flattening this conversation around immigration into this video game battle, right? I mean, one of the posters is from the video game Halo and it says, destroy the flood.

And, you know, in it, basically, they're saying, if you join ice, you become this super soldier protecting Earth from this flood of aliens, literally. And, you know, they're also making a joke of it, I think is the other thing. DHS has been putting out a lot of deportation memes. So has the White House. You know, they're very common on X. You'll see them everywhere. And some people get a little laugh out of it. But it's also pretty disturbing because they'll end up using images of real people who are being deported, you know, out of the country,

who may not have a criminal record, but are being called the worst of the worst. And so you see just the... the level of, you know, kind of bile in the discussion around these people. And, you know, it just flattens this rarely nuanced policy issue into, again, this kind of good versus evil battle that they're framing like an action movie or like a funny online joke, but is really so much more complicated. Drew Harwell covers tech for The Washington Post. When we come back, the allegations that there's Nazi imagery in some of these ICE ads,

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. You're listening to Today Explain. My name is Eric Levitts, and I'm I'm a senior correspondent for Vox, where I write about politics and the economy. You recently wrote a very good piece for Vox called The Trump administration can't stop winking at white nationalists. What do you mean? Yeah, so over the past year, the official accounts of federal agencies that are controlled by the Trump administration have repeatedly posted messages that allude to neo-Nazi and white nationalist memes or text.

Shortly after the shooting of René Nicole Good in Minnesota, the Department of Labor posted on X. One homeland, one people, one heritage. Remember who you are American. And that really seems to be an allusion to one of the most prominent slogans of Adolf Hitler, which was one people, one realm, one leader. This was a real go-to tagline for the Nazi regime. If it was just this one-off instance, you could write that off as a coincidence, a ugly one. But it comes in the context of these repeated instances in which departments have posted language that is evocative of white nationalism. Back in August, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted,

ICE recruitment poster with a picture of Uncle Sam, and it said, Which Way American Man? And that phrase seems to be a direct reference to the phrase, which way Western man, which is the title of a white nationalist tract that is quite famous and celebrated by neo-Nazi circles, and argues, among other things, that I'm quoting here, race consciousness and discrimination on the basis of race are absolutely essential to any race is survival. That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves and fiercely against it for us because we are their intended victim. And that message, you know, not only does it

appear in a tweet, but it appears in a tweet right above a link. Users can click if they want to join ICE. So this is a recruitment advertisement for ICE, which seems to be targeting specifically people who would identify this white nationalist message. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted, We'll have our home again. On the surface, this one seems pretty innocuous. Nothing wrong with having a home. But that is actually a lyric from an anthem.

Oh, my God, we'll have our home again. that has been adopted by the neo-fascist group, the proud boys, as well as other white nationalist organizations. And this one was also, again, accompanied with a link to sign up to ICE. It's a, you know, a little bit concerning. I've been watching, as I'm sure you have, the reaction to this online. Some of these examples, did you see the thing over the weekend? Gregory Bovino wore this kind of trench coat. and people said it looks like a Nazi coat.

So this coat that he has, that is not standard issue for U.S. Border Patrol. Trust me, I did my research. That is a custom coat. A custom coat that happens to look a lot like the overcoats that the Nazi SS officers wore during World War II. He's a very small man,

and he loves his little Nazi coat. And you see it in black and white, you can really tell it's a little Nazi coat. I did, yeah, I think I did see that. One of the things it makes me consider is whether there is enough plausible deniability here that you think, am I really seeing this or is it the power of suggestion that's making me think? I'm seeing something that isn't really there, that isn't really deliberate, and I should restrain myself from making judgments.

It could be, one might say, right, because people are saying it online, it could be they're not trying to be white nationalist. They're not trying to be fashy. This is all a coincidence. You're a reporter. You have to take that very seriously. Where do you land on this? I think it's clearly true that there is, you know, among liberals online overdiagnosis of, you know,

allegedly white nationalist references like you see often people, you know, counting the number of letters in a given message. And if it adds up to 14, which is a number associated with the Nazis, then they're saying, This is a coded white nationalist appeal, and I think some of that goes a bit too far. Welcome back to another episode of decoding Nazi dog whistles from the Trump administration. This is a dog whistle. 14 flags posted at 1114. But what I would say here is, you know, one is just the volume of coincidences that would need to be happening for none of this to be intentional.

But perhaps even more fundamentally, like you don't even know. need the illusion to recognize that what is being promoted here by official government agencies is a very exclusivist vision of American identity, like the first post that I quoted, one homeland, one people, one heritage. You know, even if there is no illusion there, even if the writer of that was somehow ignorant of the Hitler slogan, you know, on the surface of it, to say that, America has only one heritage, seems to me to imply that there's only one ethnicity in the United States that is truly American, because obviously, you know, the African American experience, black people in the United States have a distinct heritage from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in New

England who have a distinct heritage from, you know, Asian American immigrants who came here after 1960. And so, you know, I think that there's just kind of a surface-level thing here you know, which you also see in tweets, such as another ICE recruitment tweet that said, defend your culture, you're not defending immigration law, upholding the rule of law, but you're by doing that, protecting your culture from immigrants who implicitly are, you know, poisoning that culture.

So I think it's very difficult to believe that none of that is intentional. There is, I guess, a separate question of whether this means, that White House policy genuinely is motivated by white nationalism rather than the people who happen to hold social media posts within this administration who are younger Zoomer conservatives who have maybe disproportionately, you know, come up in this online culture that values trolling and edge lordism. But I think fundamentally official agencies of the federal government are tweeting out references to white nationalist and neo-Nazi works and are accompanying those illusions with links to join ICE.

None of us know who's actually behind these posts, right? I think there's been some reporting on some of the personnel in some of these agencies, but yeah, I don't think that each individual posts, I don't think we can say for sure who wrote them. But we do know that this administration, is extremely online, yeah? Yes. The president of the United States

is constantly posting on his own personal social media site, Truth Social. Truth Social. America will be well represented in Davos. By me. God bless you all. President Donald J. Trump.

The Vice President J.D. Vance is a heavy user of acts. You often find him going back and forth in the replies with kind of obscure internet personalities during what would seemingly be his working hours. I always wear an undershirt when I go out in public to have a fight loudly with my wife. You have this administration that is very intensely

immersed in right-wing online culture, and that makes it, you know, even harder to believe that they don't recognize kind of the references that are happening. It's not good for the country to have these federal agencies tweeting white nationalist messages. But I also don't think it's actually good for the interests of the Trump administration. Probably the least sympathetic version of the administration's case is that immigrants are polluting the blood of white Christian America. And yet that seems to be where they're leaning in with a lot of their online messaging. So, yeah, I do see the administration's social media habits really informing their political messaging in a way that is not in their own interests, and more significantly, not in the interests of the United States being a country that is welcoming to all its people and functions as a multi-ethnic society.

Eric Levitts is a correspondent for Vox. Danielle Hewitt and Peter Ballin-on-Rosen produced today's show. Jolly Myers edited. Patrick Boyd and David Tadishore engineered. And Andrea Lopez-Cruciutto check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.