Drew Harwell

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 cinematic, 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.

Yeah, so they've done geofencing 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.

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 protectors who want to, you know, in their words, like, protect the American way of life.

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 timey 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 law fighters on the frontier fighting these outlaws.

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 at a changing America and wanting to pull in people who want to fight that.

We've talked to a number of people who are currently inside ICE and DHS who are, to be honest, pretty unnerved 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.