New York
CNN
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On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security posted a striking graphic on its official X account. Uncle Sam, a symbol of American patriotism, is depicted nailing a poster to a wall that reads, “Help your country… and yourself.” Written underneath the poster is the sentence, “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS,” and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement hot line.
The post — which DHS and the White House also posted to Instagram — prompted a flood of criticism, with some social media users comparing the post to authoritarian propaganda. On Thursday, at least two far-right X accounts claimed to have a hand in creating or disseminating the image before it was shared by DHS. A source within DHS told CNN the agency did not create the graphic.
The DHS’s Uncle Sam post has more than 81,000 likes and comes as immigration protests roil Los Angeles and other cities around the country, amid a deportation crackdown by President Donald Trump and DHS. And it marks an escalation in the agency’s communication strategy, after weeks of using social media to attack or mock perceived enemies, promote ICE arrests and ridicule media reports it disagrees with. In another recent post, DHS responded to a comment appearing to question a popular X user’s immigration status with a meme of a character with magnifying glasses.
In May, DHS also said it was reviewing a reality TV show pitch where immigrants would compete for US citizenship, which an agency spokesperson said at the time was in the early stages of vetting and had not yet been approved or denied. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem later told a Senate committee that she had “no knowledge” of a reality show plan.
The Uncle Sam graphic is reminiscent of media used previously by other governments to provoke fear, especially of immigrants, said Elisabeth Fondren, a journalism professor at St. John’s University who has studied government propaganda and communications during war times.
“This poster fits within a long history of anti-immigrant rhetoric and, yes, state propaganda,” Fondren said. “It evokes these remnants of Cold War, fake propaganda by the Russians, or, you know, authoritarian fear mongering messages … but what I think is so interesting is that this is a call to action in an environment where we’re not in a war.”
In defending the Uncle Sam post, the agency told CNN that it aligns with terminology used by other officials in the executive branch. DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller using terms like “invade” or “invaders” when referring to undocumented immigrants.
Asked for comment on this story, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CNN that criticisms of the post “are fundamentally unserious and reflect the completely juvenile state of mainstream journalism. These reporters should get off social media and start focusing on the very real victims of illegal alien crime.”
“Every American citizen should support federal law enforcement in their just effort to deport criminal illegal alien invaders from our country,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “During the Biden Administration our borders were opened to an invasion by the very worst from around the world. Now President Trump and Secretary Noem are reversing the destruction of our nation.”
Trump’s overall handling of immigration tends to earn higher approval ratings than his performance on other issues, but there is also evidence that Americans are less supportive of the way he’s carrying out deportations. A CNN poll in April showed 52% of Americans said Trump has gone too far in deporting undocumented immigrants.
DHS’s provocative social media strategy has led to a rapidly growing audience. Engagement with the DHS account has grown significantly since Trump took office; it’s second only to the White House in online engagement among US government accounts, the agency said.
DHS communication officials have in recent days frequently posted videos from the LA protests that it says indicate the demonstrations are not peaceful and highlight law enforcement efforts to quell disorder.
The demonstrations have impacted a relatively small area of the city, mostly in a section of downtown LA, where largely peaceful daytime protests have been giving way to volatile, occasionally violent scenes each night that have resulted in hundreds of arrests. The curfew zone is about one square mile, in a city that covers more than 450 square miles.
The agency’s posts come as random and anonymous users on platforms like X and TikTok have also shared old and sometimes completely fake content about the unrest, projecting an image of chaos, often in an apparent attempt to juice their own engagement.
The agency has also posted names, photos and alleged charges of people it has arrested as justification for ICE’s operations in Los Angeles. And on Wednesday, DHS shared a post on X that said: “Liberals don’t know things.”
Many of the posts to the DHS account are memes or content created by outside sources.
The image of the Uncle Sam poster was posted on X last Friday, around the time tensions in Los Angeles escalated, by podcaster C. Jay Engel, who describes himself as “Christian nationalist adjacent” and has claimed that “nations cannot survive replacement migration.” After DHS shared the Uncle Sam image, Engel posted: “This image came from my account. NEVER STOP POSTING.”
“The question is, ‘Is there room for like-minded Christians and patriots in Tennessee?’” the podcaster, Engel, said in an October podcast, in response to a listener’s question. “Yes, there’s an imperative for like-minded Christians to gather and fight with us.”
Although Engel circulated the image of the Uncle Sam poster, another X user claimed to have created the image. That pseudonymous X account, which has the words “Wake Up White Man” in its biography, is full of nativist rhetoric and reposted another X user who declared: “Whites deserve our own nations, like everyone else is allowed to have.” The pseudonymous account appears to have been the first to post the image.
CNN has requested comment from Engel and attempted to reach the X user who claimed to have created the image.
CNN’s Samantha Delouya contributed reporting.
