AMY GOODMAN: As outrage grows across the United States over the Trump administration’s deadly immigration crackdown in Minnesota, we begin today’s show looking at the recruiting practices of ICE — that’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Washington Post recently reported on an internal strategy document shared among immigration officials that details plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun-rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and geotargeted ads. The article in the Post is headlined ”ICE plans $100 million 'wartime recruitment' push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires.”

We’re joined now from Tampa, Florida, by one of the reporters who broke the story. Drew Harwell is a technology reporter with The Washington Post.

Drew, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain exactly what you found. Who exactly is being targeted with this massive influx of money?

DREW HARWELL: Yeah. Thank you, Amy.

This is called a surge hiring marketing strategy document. It goes into extraordinary detail into the methods they want to use to reach more than, you know, 14,000 new employees for ICE to basically double the deportation strike force that they have on the street. How they want to reach those people is through social media marketing, real-world marketing — right? — billboards and bus stops, kind of the classic, traditional styles of advertising, but also through these unusually precise techniques that would include geotargeting. So, they would basically create a fence around gun shows, UFC fights, NASCAR races, military bases to really try to identify who are these people who would be interested in becoming new soldiers for their fight against immigration.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk about the language and imagery of these recruitment ads? Most of them seem to rely on, to say the least, jingoistic and xenophobic wartime rhetoric and symbolism, where joining ICE is seen as performing a, quote, “sacred duty” of, quote, “defending the homeland and expelling foreign invaders, because America needs you.” And then there’s the overt references to white supremacist messaging. Less than two days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, multiple social media accounts run by the Department of Homeland Security posted a recruitment ad for ICE captioned “We’ll have our home again,” with the image of a man in a cowboy hat riding a horse in a snowy field, the caption referencing the title of a white nationalist song that’s popular in neo-Nazi circles. Last year, an ICE recruitment post on Homeland Security’s X account showed an image of Uncle Sam at a crossroads with signs pointing to cultural decline, homeland and invasion. The post was captioned “Which way, American man?” which echoes the title of a white supremacist neo-Nazi book, Which Way Western Man?, more recently adopted as a popular far-right meme. Can you talk more about these white supremacist messaging in government posts?

DREW HARWELL: Yeah, you know, if there were — if there was one slogan that seemed to have some connection to neo-Nazi spaces, it might be a coincidence, but we’ve seen a pattern of these kinds of, you know, songs that were popular among these very far-right circles, messages, even kind of visual styles that you would see in memes that, you know, once were kind of 4chan far-right extremist memes, that are now being, you know, trafficked by the government. And so, you know, the DHS has defended themselves as saying, “You guys are grasping at straws. This is all a coincidence.” But I think, you know, there’s a pattern there that people are really seeing.

And, you know, the broader message in all their advertising is as you said. They are characterizing this as a war against foreign invaders. They are not subtle about it, right? They’re really using militaristic language to frame this as a battle of good versus evil — white, classic, traditional Americans defending the homeland against foreign invaders. And so, you’ve seen in their marketing it really is — you know, you have a lot of kind of Army-style messaging, where it’s big guys with guns on the border repelling the hordes. Or you have this more classical Americana, almost wartime propaganda from World War I style of advertising, where, you know, it’s these kind of classic white Americans who are defending the West, moving out into the frontier kind of fighting the hordes.

So, this style of marketing is very new even for ICE. You know, ICE has not really gone to this level of aggressive, you know, jingoistic messaging. But it’s — and they’re spending a lot of money on it, so you’re just seeing it everywhere on social media now. And the question is: Who are they trying to attract? Why are they using this messaging? Are they going for people who are really trying to crack some skulls and defend this, what they think is the American way of life? Is that kind of like why they’re framing it this way?

AMY GOODMAN: Drew, Congressmember Raskin recently wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Noem for ICE recruiting records, asking, “How many pardoned January 6th insurrectionists have been hired by your respective departments?” You know anything about this, Drew?

DREW HARWELL: I’ve seen that letter. And this has been a question, you know, because part of what they’re trying to do is attract so many people. This is a department that has tried to backfill attrition over the years, but they’ve never tried to get thousands of people all at once to go out on the streets. So they’re changing their standards for who they feel is qualified to come in. And so, the question is: Are they changing the standards to such a degree that they’re allowing in people who are untrained? This is something I hear from people inside ICE and DHS all the time. We’re bringing in people who are untrained, who don’t have law enforcement background, or are mistrained, or just want a badge and a gun — right? — just want to go out on the street and rough people up. And so, there’s a question of: Are these people that you’re getting in hardcore partisans who are in it for the glory of combat, or are these people who are going to come in and really follow the law and try to be nuanced and niche about it, or do they just want to crack some skulls?

AMY GOODMAN: It’s really interesting about the cutting back of training. Senator John Warner recently said that the cutting back of training was to 47 days, which is way less than it used to be. And he was saying that it’s 47 for the 47th president, Donald Trump. But if you can talk about the benefits that ICE is offering recruits and the ways ICE is sweetening the deal? This is a like five-second snippet from an ICE ad on Google that promises a bonus of up to $50,000 and student loan forgiveness.

ICE AD: Join ICE, with bonuses up to $50,000 and generous benefits.

AMY GOODMAN: Drew Harwell, can you comment on this?

DREW HARWELL: It’s a lot of money, and it’s attracting people, right? I mean, some of these deportation officer jobs start at $50,000 salaries. So, they’re really trying to throw money at people to get them in the door. But also, you know, the people who are coming in may not be qualified to be in the door, right? And, you know, if you’re giving them less training, 47 days of training, just because it’s an arbitrary number that you like because of the president, are you removing that, you know, standard that’s going to make them quality recruits just to satisfy this other metric?

AMY GOODMAN: Now, I know you have to go, and so I want to ask you a question you can answer in 15 seconds on a slightly different issue, and it’s Nekima Levy Armstrong. You’re the tech reporter for The Washington Post. What the Department of Homeland Security put out, that picture where they changed her image as she was being arrested. She was just walking; instead, they showed her crying.

DREW HARWELL: Yeah, they digitally altered it, right? And they put it out there without any kind of disclosure, to demean her, basically, to make her look like — you know, in the real picture, she’s standing tall, she’s walking. And in the fake photo, she’s just sobbing, tears streaming down her face. And, you know, it’s a lie, basically. They are lying to Americans about what they’re capturing.

And they’re doing it in a subtle way. You know, we’ve seen the memes from the White House that have been very bombastic — Trump in the fighter jet dumping poop on protesters. They’re satirical, a little disturbing, but they’re still, you know, basically a joke. This is, I think, even more disturbing, based on the people I talked to, because it was so subtle.

And if you were to only see it from the White House account, which, again, is a traditionally government account that requires us to trust them, asks us to trust them, you’re going to get a completely false impression of the reality. So, I think it’s scary because it shows that if the White House wants to target you and manipulate your image, they’ll do it. They don’t seem to have any qualms about doing that. So I think that that presages some scary things for the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Drew Harwell, I want to thank you so much for taking this time, technology reporter for The Washington Post, joining us from Tampa, Florida.

Coming up, we’ll hear excerpts from Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s town hall last night, where she was attacked by a man who sprayed her with an unknown substance from a syringe. We’ll speak to Congressmember Delia Ramirez. Stay with us.