Selling ICE to America…

The Washington Post does a deep drive into how the Trump Admin has mounted an extensive media driven picture of  its Immigration Customs Enforcement effort to find, detain and export migrants from America…

Loaded with over a $100 Billion….

The quest goes on with a continual drive for larger body counts….

The word is there have been about 600,000 removals in the last 11 months…..

The word also is there are about 13 Million Plus undocumented migrant’s in America…

Do the math….

There HAS to be a better solution on this…

Across thousands of internal ICE messages reviewed by The Washington Post, this kind of celebration has become commonplace. The messages show how the team has worked closely with the White House, which has urged them to produce videos for social media of immigrant arrests and confrontations to portray its push for mass deportation as critical to protecting the American way of life.

Before officials could post the Houston video, they had to figure out how to frame it. Officials did not know if all the arrestees had criminal records, they wrote in the chats, undermining a slogan the team had worked to promote on social media: that ICE targeted the “Worst of the Worst.”

After some discussion, the team decided on a compromise.

Instead of arguing they’d snared hardened criminals, officials wrote a caption saying the arrests showed the dangers of “illegal aliens … behind the wheel.”

Then, to maximize the video’s chances of going viral, they needed a soundtrack.

They settled on a rap song by Nbhd Nick, which his label would later tell The Post was used without permission, that starts, “Oh, you thought this was a game, huh?”

The video was posted to ICE’s social media channels, where it has been viewed more than 1 million times in total.

For years, this ICE team had run like a routine government communications shop, dispensing public service announcements and news releases few Americans would see. But during President Donald Trump’s second term, ICE’s public affairs arm has rapidly transformed into an influencer-style media machine, churning out flashy videos of tactical operations and immigration raids.

The internal communications reviewed by The Post show how the ICE team has coordinated with the White House, working to satisfy Trump aides’ demands to “flood the airwaves,” as one official urged in the messages, with brash content showing immigrants being chased, grabbed and detained.

They also show federal officials mocking immigrants in crass terms and discussing video edits that might help legitimize the administration’s aggressive stance. The team also knowingly used copyright-protected music without permission from the rights holders, among other techniques designed to boost their online attention…

…

‘Feed the beast’

Launched after the Sept. 11 attacks, ICE and DHS had always functioned as traditional law enforcement agencies focused on public safety and with minimal tools for self-promotion.

Their public affairs divisions employed small teams of video producers, mostly for unexceptional tasks: facilitating TV interviews, running the cameras at workforce retirement ceremonies, recording safety commercials for the Super Bowl. Some producers traveled to make videos when DHS agents took down sex abusers or crime rings. Video producers would film targeted operations, a current DHS official said, but immigration enforcement was only a fraction of the workload.

After the start of Trump’s second term, however, ICE’s ranks swelled as federal agents were diverted to immigration enforcement and the One Big Beautiful Bill tripled the agency’s annual budget to deliver on the White House’s promises to secure the southern border and speed up deportations. ICE’s average arrest count jumped from around 300 a day last year to more than 800 a day since Trump took office, according to a Post analysis of ICE data released by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California at Berkeley.

DHS’s media operation was no exception. Public affairs teams were injected with a new crew of political appointees who had orders from the White House to treat immigration as their top priority and produce dramatized visuals of ICE operations and arrests to command user attention, the current and former officials told The Post. The video teams’ workload exploded, and immigration became the only topic anyone could pursue, according to interviews.

“We’re not doing child pornography cases. We’re not doing human trafficking cases,” one current DHS official told The Post. “Everything is immigration.”…

….

Trump administration officials have defended the intensity of their media operation to reporters by saying it’s what Americans want: visual proof that Trump is fulfilling his promise to deport millions of immigrants nationwide.

But ICE’s social media onslaught appears to have done little to change Americans’ attitudes en masse. The share of Americans saying immigration is a good thing for the country leaped to 79 percent in July, a record high, a Gallup poll found in July. About 62 percent of Americans said they disliked how Trump was handling the issue.

Despite this, the media operations at DHS show no signs of slowing down. Inside the ICE team, the chats showed, many were proud of their work — and committed for the long haul.

In August, after an ICE official shared census numbers showing the country’s immigrant population had dropped by 2 million, an ICE legal associate responded simply: “Only 40 million to go.”…

More…

Note…

The above piece says support for ICE wasa at 79% in July….

Another poll has that support at 34% in November 2025….

HUGE Drop?

Media effort has actually HURT the actions?