Chapter 1: What recent changes are being made to ICE's hiring practices?
ICE recently undertook a nationwide surge aimed at hiring thousands of agents and summed up by these three lines at ice.gov slash join. America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need you to get them out. You do not need an undergraduate degree. The frenetic pace is raising some questions about how agents are being vetted.
A left-leaning freelance journalist named Laura Jadid said last week that she'd applied for a job at ICE and been accepted despite having been publicly critical of the agency in her reporting. Not only did the drug test not seem to be a deal breaker, I appeared to have been offered a final job offer. The truth is, they're taking anyone with a pulse.
DHS called her allegation a lazy lie on X, and Jadid replied with a screen grab that appeared to show she had reached the final offer stage. Coming up on Today Explained, inside the chaos of ICE recruiting, edgelord memes, allegations of Nazi and white nationalist illusions, and zero apologies.
Chapter 2: How is ICE targeting specific demographics for recruitment?
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This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Drew Harwell. Drew is a tech reporter for The Washington Post who recently got his hands on an internal ICE document on hiring. Drew, tell me what this document is and what's in it.
Yeah, so this is an internal confidential document that ICE officers spread to each other that outlines what they call their surge hiring recruiting strategy. So it lays out $100 million in recruiting spending that they want to pour into social media advertising, real world advertising. They want to reach pro-ICE influencers who can get the message out.
They want to go to gun fairs, gun shows, hunting shows to reach people. Just use every technique they can to hopefully, in their words, reach more than 10,000 potential deportation officers, lawyers, and other staffers that can help them carry out this giant deportation that the Trump administration has been I mean, their whole model is to basically blanket the internet with these kinds of ads.
And if you've gone on social media or on some of these other news websites, you've seen join.ice.gov. That's like their portal for getting everybody in. And yeah, $100 million is a ton of money. It's like a big corporate advertising campaign. ICE has never done anything to this scale. They've never done anything like this. And so they're trying everything, basically.
I mean, if you've gone on X or YouTube or Instagram, they have these really, like, patriotic machismo ads that say, like, the enemies are at the gates. You need to join ICE to defend the homeland and repel these foreign invaders. September 11th, 2001. Nearly 3,000 Americans lost because terrorists were here illegally. From that day, ICE was born. America's first...
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.
All right. So they're blanketing the Internet. Then there's also real life. If I were to come upon one of these ads in real life, where would I be likely to be? Where would I be hanging out if I saw one of these things?
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Chapter 3: What strategies is ICE using to attract new agents?
This appeal to aggression is going to be getting aggressive people who aren't trained, who have this idea in their head that they can start being this warrior on the street when they realize that the reality on the ground should be a lot more nuanced and a lot more careful because, you know, these are real people. These are real people's lives. This isn't just a meme.
OK, so that's the internal concern. These ads, as you've said, are very, very public. How is the public responding to being hit with these in the wild and on the Internet?
Yeah, so you'll see on social media a lot of people who are already, you know, kind of pro-Trump, pro-ICE are celebrating them as like, yeah, let's really get out there and do this thing.
Support your local ICE raid. Clap emoji. Let's go. Keep America safe.
But you also see a ton of criticism and backlash, like Spotify, where if you'll be listening to music on the free service, you'll get a commercial that'll pop up that'll say, join ICE.
In too many cities, dangerous illegals walk free as police are forced to stand down. Join ICE and help us catch the worst of the worst.
And you can actually see on, like, the Spotify message boards where people are outraged. They're saying, I'm going to cancel my subscription. I don't want to hear this. I don't want to be thinking about this.
I wanted to inform you that I am canceling my Spotify subscription because my conscience can no longer support a company that plays ICE recruitment ads.
So you've also seen, you know, some of this, because of this campaign being so targeted, part of it is like they're also targeting people to self-deport. So they're targeting, you know, genres of music they feel like will be listened to by people who may not be in the country legally.
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Chapter 4: What concerns have been raised about the vetting process for new agents?
So this is a recruitment advertisement for ICE, which seems to be targeting specifically people who would identify this white nationalist message. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted, we'll have our home again. You know, on the surface, this one seems pretty innocuous. Nothing wrong with having a home, but that is actually a lyric from an anthem.
Oh, my God.
That has been adopted by the neo-fascist group, the Proud Boys, as well as other white nationalist organizations. And this one was also, again, accompanied with a link to sign up to ICE. It's, you know, a little bit concerning.
I've been watching, as I'm sure you have, the reaction to this online. Some of these examples. Did you see the thing over the weekend? Gregory Bovino wore this kind of trench coat and people said it looks like a Nazi coat.
So this coat that he has, that is not standard issue for U.S. Border Patrol. Trust me, I did my research. That is a custom coat. A custom coat that happens to look a lot like... the overcoats that the Nazi SS officers wore during World War II.
He's a very small man, and he loves his little Nazi coat. When you see it in black and white, you can really tell it's a little Nazi coat. I did, yeah, I think I did see that.
One of the things that makes me consider is whether there is enough plausible deniability here that you think... Am I really seeing this, or is it the power of suggestion that's making me think I'm seeing something that isn't really there, that isn't really deliberate, and I should restrain myself from making judgments?
It could be, one might say, right, because people are saying it online, it could be they're not trying to be white nationalists. They're not trying to be fashy. This is all a coincidence. You're a reporter. You have to take that very seriously. Where do you land on this? I think it's clearly true that there is
you know, among liberals online over-diagnosis of, you know, allegedly white nationalist references, like you see often people, you know, counting the number of letters in a given message, and if it adds up to 14, which is a number associated with the Nazis, then they're saying this is a coded white nationalist appeal. And, you know, I think some of that goes... a bit too far.
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Chapter 5: How are ICE advertisements appealing to American patriotism?
The president of the United States is constantly posting on his own personal social media site, Truth Social. Earth Social. America will be well represented in Davos by me, God bless you all, President Donald J. Trump. The Vice President J.D.
Vance is a heavy user of X. You often find him going back and forth in the replies with kind of obscure internet personalities during what would seemingly be his working hours. I always wear an undershirt when I go out in public to have a fight loudly with my wife. You have this administration that is very intensely immersed in right wing online culture.
And that makes it even harder to believe that they don't recognize kind of the references that are happening. It's not good for the country to have these federal agencies tweeting white nationalist messages. But I also don't think it's actually good for the interests of the Trump administration.
Probably the least sympathetic version of the administration's case is that immigrants are polluting the blood of white Christian America. And yet that seems to be where they're leaning in with a lot of their online messaging.
So, yeah, I do see the administration's social media habits really informing their political messaging in a way that is not in their own interests and, more significantly, not in the interests of the United States being a country that is welcoming to all its people and functions as a multi-ethnic society.
Eric Levitz is a correspondent for Vox. Danielle Hewitt and Peter Balanon-Rosen produced today's show. Jolie Myers edited. Patrick Boyd and David Tadishore engineered. And Andrea Lopez-Crusado checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
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