Trump's DHS ‘report all foreign invaders' poster stokes hatred, not safety
The Trump administration escalated its anti-immigrant campaign by promoting a poster calling on Americans to report 'all foreign invaders' to authorities, only days after sending the National Guard and Marines to quell largely peaceful protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.
It may be no coincidence that President Donald Trump's latest anti-immigration offensive comes at a time when the World Bank and major U.S. financial institutions are predicting an economic downturn, fueled by his tariff wars. The new immigration moves seem designed to distract from the country's economic slowdown.
The Washington D.C-based World Bank issued a report on June 10 forecasting that the U.S. economy will grow by only 1.4% this year, or half of last year's rate of 2.8%. It cited Trump's trade wars as one of the main culprits.
Just days earlier, Elon Musk — the world's richest man and until last week a top Trump adviser — warned that the president's tariffs 'will cause a recession in the second half this year.' Musk later apologized for some of his posts and deleted several of them, including that one, after being warned of potential administration retaliations against his companies.
The Morgan Stanley investment bank projects that the U.S. economy will grow at a meager 1.5% this year, and 1% in 2026.
Trump may also be seeking to distract from his 'One Big Beautiful Bill' tax legislation, now pending in the Senate. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warns it would strip millions of Americans of Medicaid health coverage and could increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion over the next decade.
Granted, Trump and his hard-line immigration adviser, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, have a long history of lashing out against immigrants. Trump famously said in 2023, and has repeated several times since, that immigrants 'are poisoning the blood of our country.'
In recent days, Miller has labeled the Los Angeles demonstrators are an 'insurrectionist mob' and a 'threat to civilization.'
This, despite the fact that — as of this writing — not a single death has occurred during the Los Angeles protests. By comparison, Trump hailed the violent Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol rioters as 'patriots,' even though their rampage left at least seven dead and more than 150 police officers injured.
The poster urging Americans to rat on 'all foreign invaders' appeared June 11 on the Department of Homeland Security's official X (formerly Twitter) account, and was quickly shared by Miller on his own social media.
The poster, reminiscent of World War II propaganda, depicts Uncle Sam wielding a hammer as he hangs a sign reading: 'Help your country...and yourself...Report all foreign invaders.' Below, it lists an ICE hotline for reporting the so-called 'invaders.'
In smaller print, the DHS post urges Americans to 'help your country locate and arrest illegal aliens' and invites them to report 'criminal activity' to the ICE hotline.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration attorney and senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted that the poster was originally created by a white supremacist known for spreading anti-Jewish and anti-black propaganda, who took credit for it.
Regardless of its origin, the DHS-endorsed call to report 'foreign invaders' echoes tactics used by authoritarian regimes — as happened in Nazi Germany, or still happens in Communist China or Cuba.
The government telling you to inform on your neighbors is profoundly un-American. It contradicts America's respect for the rule of law, equal rights for all and a professional civil service, Reichlin-Melnik said.
'The bigger issue is the use of the word 'invaders,' because undocumented immigrants are not invaders,' he told me. 'No invasion in history has involved people crossing the border to work as dishwashers, or to pick crops, and who entered the country legally.'
Even the hundreds of thousands of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and humanitarian parole holders from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and other countries — whom Trump now seeks to deport — cannot be described as 'illegals,' as the administration insists.
By definition, someone approved by the U.S. government to enter and work legally is not an 'illegal alien,' critics say.
'The biggest danger is that this kind of rhetoric is dangerous, because people believe it, and it can lead to violence,' Reichlin-Melnik told me. 'The El Paso shooter in 2018 drove hundreds of miles to massacre people at a Walmart because he sincerely believed that Latinos were invading the United States.'
Indeed, we're treading a perilous path.
First, Trump administration officials claimed their anti-immigration crusade would target mainly 'illegal criminals' — a stance many Americans support.
Then, the net widened to include 'illegal aliens' in general. Now, the goalpost keeps shifting, and the rhetoric targets 'all foreign invaders.'
The DHS-publicized poster is not funny. This leap is a leap too far, too fast, and in the wrong direction.
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