The Trump Administration Is Using Memes to Turn Mass Deportation Into One Big Joke

WIRED

a day ago

Aug 12, 2025 11:37 AM Memes shared by the White House, DHS, and ICE have used catchy TikTok tunes to normalize mass deportation and Christian nationalist narratives. Experts say that's the point. Photo Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images
The Trump administration has a new propaganda strategy: turning deportations into one big meme.
The catchy jingle advertising low-cost holidays on Jet2, a budget British airline, has been the viral meme of summer 2025. Its ubiquity was clearly not lost on the Department of Homeland Security's communications team. Late last month, DHS published a video to their social accounts that incorporated the "Nothing Beats a Jet2 Holiday" tune alongside footage of ICE detainees in handcuffs boarding a deportation plane. The post was captioned: 'When ICE books you a one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation. Nothing beats it!'
To many of the administration's supporters, who responded to the Jet2 holiday post with crying laughing emojis and American flags, the video was hilarious. One commenter wrote, 'I thought this was a meme account at first!'
In recent months, official government social media accounts—primarily DHS, ICE, CBP, and the White House—have resembled parodies of themselves. But experts say it's intentional: The memes these accounts share are core to the Trump administration's propaganda strategy. Through them, with attempts at Gen Z humor as the gateway, the administration reinforces an 'us vs. them' mindset. Along with normalizing mass deportation, they also tap into Christian nationalist narratives and reach young men via callous jokes that have been recycled through the far-right online ecosystem.
A post on June 28 featured four alligators wearing ICE hats, intended to advertise the detention facility in Florida's Everglades dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz.' On July 2, DHS shared a video of a border patrol agent looking through a scope, trained on blurry night vision images of purported migrants attempting to cross the border. The video was published with the popular TikTok song, 'Somebody's Watching Me' by Chico Rose x 71 Digits. The caption warns: 'You're not wrong.' A video shared on July 24 showed footage of ICE detainees boarding a deportation flight, with the caption 'Boarding now: Criminal illegal aliens. Next stop: Literally anywhere but here.' The post was accompanied by Frank Sinatra's breezy classic, 'Come Fly With Me.' Libs of TikTok, a far-right and anti-LGBTQ social account with millions of followers, reposted that video, along with three crying laughing emojis.
And last week, DHS published an ICE recruitment poster that used an old magazine ad for the 1982 'King of Clubs,' a Ford Club Wagon vehicle, along with the text, 'Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?' The move from viral sensation to DHS meme is particularly clear here: The image was originally shared a week earlier by O.W. Root, a style columnist for The Blaze. A small account with 364 followers quote-tweeted the post, with the caption 'imagine monitoring the situation with your boys here.' That post went viral. Days later, the image, along with a similar caption, appeared on DHS' social accounts.
The fact that the government is now integrating the casual cruelty of the highly online far-right into its public messaging shows the degree to which it's escaped containment. It's also indicative of the demographic the administration is attempting to reach. The Trump administration is looking to hire 14,050 ICE officers over the next three years to bolster deportation operations. Although the agency just removed age limits from prospective applicants, it now appears they're trying to use humor to make ICE seem like some sort of fun fraternity.
'DHS in particular, is trying to use Twitter [and Instagram] as a form of not just recruitment, but also promotion,' says Joan Donovan, assistant professor at Boston University and the coauthor of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America , 'and the kind of promotion that they're doing is targeted towards, I would say, young men, in their teenage years or 20s.'
When asked for comment, DHS' assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin responded: 'What a silly little story. Who are these 'experts'?
'What's 'cruel' is the media continuing to ignore victims of murder, rape, human trafficking and gang violence as you continue to do the bidding of violent criminal illegal aliens,' McLaughlin added.
In response to a request for comment, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, 'the White House social media account often highlights the deportations of heinous criminal illegal aliens who have terrorized American communities. Wired and their so-called 'experts,' that they refused to provide additional information on, should cover what's actually cruel—criminal illegal allients murdering, raping, and assaulting innocent American citizens as a direct result of Joe Biden's open border and Democrat sanctuary city policies. And while Wired runs cover for criminal illegal aliens, we won't apologize for posting banger memes.'
(Around 70 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record at all, and many of those with convictions committed only minor crimes, like traffic or immigration infractions).
The mainstreaming of dehumanizing humor is what troubles Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor in the school of communication at American University who studies the persuasive effects of extremist propaganda. 'I don't think that this messaging is bad because it's mean, or because it's sloppy, or because it's unbecoming of the Office of the President, although all these things I do believe are true,' says Braddock. 'My biggest problem with it is that it normalizes aggression, with the normalization of aggression, and the normalization of the dehumanization of others, immigrants or otherwise, it's not much of a jump to actual violence.'
Memes have always been core to President Donald Trump's political strategy, says Donovan: 'One of the things that was very distinctive about Trump's meme campaigns in 2016 is his Twitter account almost appeared to most people as just chaos, because he had about six or seven different audiences that he was talking to all at once.'
That chaotic style of messaging now extends to his administration. Some of these posts rack up tens of thousands of likes and get reshared across other platforms, like on Proud Boy's Telegram channels or big pro-police Facebook groups. A few of them have even inspired T-shirt designs.
Taken all together, DHS' social feeds reflect the jumbled far-right ecosystem, which combines the banal language of everyday memes with 4chan humor, old-school white supremacist dog whistles, and overtures to Christian nationalism. And the new, shiny packaging is very much the point. 'Short bursts of imagery and music appeal emotionally in ways that facts and data often don't,' says Brian Levin, the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. 'It functions as an emotionally familiar and comforting gift-wrap that here revolves around protection, preservation, fear and tribalism."
One DHS post from July 14 used a painting by Morgan Weistling, titled 'New Life in a New Land,' showing a white couple from the Old West in their wagon cradling a baby. DHS captioned the post, 'Remember your Homeland's Heritage.' The artist said he never gave DHS permission to use his painting, though the image began making the rounds online in 2023 when it was shared by 'Trad West,' a popular Christian nationalist meme account. The image resurfaced again earlier this year when it was boosted by the anti-immigration meme account 'Americana Aesthetic" and a gender traditionalist account 'Giga Based Dad.' These accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers, including Gab CEO Andrew Torba, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, and Elon Musk, founder of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Another DHS post from July 23 incorporated the painting 'American Progress' by John Gast, which shows settlers displacing indigenous populations. The painting appears in many high school textbooks about the philosophy 'Manifest Destiny,' which American settlers believed gave them divine authority to expand across the West. The caption reads 'a heritage to be proud of, a homeland worth defending.' Another video with the on-screen caption 'a Homeland Worth Protecting' shows images exclusively of white people or white families, to the tune of 'This Land is Your Land.'
It all reminds Levin of other propaganda he's studied extensively through his career: 'The DHS and other administration imagery of white virtuous family folks and the society they created being at existential risk from 'violent foreign criminal invaders' has been a mainstay in white supremacist lore for over a century, from the early 20th century Klan to contemporary neo-Nazi skinheads,' says Levin.
"The key here is not to view these as individual examples of mostly wholesome 'nostalgic' messaging, but as an ideologically connective bridge,' Levin adds, 'where renewed invocations of whiteness, Christianity and family preservation links the horrendous border practices of today to brutal late 19th century westward expansion and racially restrictive immigration laws.'
Some of DHS' posts in recent months have even incorporated Bible verses. One video, for example, superimposed text from Proverbs 28:1—'The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion"—over footage of nocturnal border patrol operations, accompanied by a voiceover from the 2022 movie 'The Batman' and a caption addressed to 'every criminal illegal alien in America.' 'Darkness is no longer your ally,' the caption reads. 'You represent an existential threat to the citizens of the United States, and US Border Patrol's Special Operations Group will stop at nothing to hunt you down.'
This, experts say, plays to Christian nationalist narratives that cast Trump and his administration as righteous forces in a primordial battle between good and evil. 'By juxtaposing Bible verses with imagery showing the removal of people of color or any 'enemies of America,' it suggests that the mission that they are undertaking is divine, that it's blessed by God. And if it's blessed by God, then it can't be wrong,' says Braddock. 'If you characterize your mission as divinely blessed, then the other side of the coin is evil or demonization.'
Allusions to religion might have once scared away young voters. But now, it's being used to lure them in, rolled into one big joke—with TikTok trending music as its soundtrack.