Trump turns migrants into memes to promote deportation agenda
As President Trump pursues his hardline immigration policies, the White House has sought to punctuate public messaging for the crackdown through memes and designed-to-go-viral content.
Why it matters: The memes mirror President Trump's combative posture, adopting the boundary pushing, extremely online humor of the MAGA base while reveling in the outrage they generate from opponents.
The embrace of comedic memes contrast an immigration crackdown that has sparked legal challenges and warnings about the inhumane conditions faced by detainees.
The latest: The latest White House memes came Thursday when the administration posted an AI-generated cartoon on X of an undocumented immigrant being arrested by ICE.
The meme, showing a woman crying while being handcuffed by a stern-looking immigration official, was made in the vein of ChatGPT-produced Studio Ghibli-style portraits that have recently taken the internet by storm.
State of play: While Trump often painted an apocalyptic vision of criminal immigrants on the campaign trail, other immigration-related memes posted by the administration adopt a mocking tone.
In response to a Homeland Security X post earlier this month about the deportation of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, the White House posted a photo of Trump waving sanguinely out of the window of a McDonald's drive-thru.
For Valentine's Day, the White House posted a meme of Trump and border czar Tom Homan's heads floating on a pink, heart-themed background.
"Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we'll deport you," the meme read.
Between the lines: Trump's affinity for memes reflects the MAGA movement's origins in some of the "darker corners of the internet" — like 4chan — "where meme culture is ... quite prevalent," Jacob Neiheisel, an associate professor of political science at the University of Buffalo, told Axios.
Memes and other forms of viral content allow the administration to continue communicating with that portion of its base, he added.
The White House did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment regarding the communications strategy or criticisms of it.
The big picture: The Trump administration has also churned out other forms of content apparently designed for internet virality.
Earlier this week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made waves when she posed against a backdrop of shirtless prisoners at El Salvador's CECOT mega-prison.
The White House has also sought to capitalize on the viral ASMR trend, posting a video last month — entitled "ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight" — showing officials putting immigrants in shackles and handcuffs before they were boarded onto a plane.
Flashback: Memes played a large role in the 2024 presidential race, particularly for the short-lived Harris-Walz campaign.
While the Harris and Walz memes embraced and reclaimed the running-mates' personal quirks — like former Vice President Harris' love of Venn diagrams — the memes from the Trump White House are aimed outward, targeting a vulnerable population.
Democrats, who don't have the same history of engaging with their base outside of mainstream channels, have struggled to embrace meme culture authentically, according to Neiheisel.
The bottom line: The memeification of deportations certainly "looks cruel," but is unlikely to spark political backlash, Neiheisel said.
People in the political middle "who could possibly be turned off by what they're doing ... those folks are fairly checked out," he said.
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