How the U.S.’s Narrative Hurts Immigrants

It is a regular day in one of the United States’s largest cities. People wearing masks are driving around in unmarked cars, raiding and picking up people off the street—kidnapping them. The people they’re targeting are just regular people: someone coming home from work, teaching at a school, going to a restaurant. These raids are becoming normal in the city. These masked people say they want to put things back the way they were before—where everyone speaks English, knows the customs, follows the law and looks like “true Americans”. They spray people with pepper spray if you resist

This may sound dystopian, but it’s the current state of America. Since his inauguration-day pledge to “protect… the American people from invasion,” Donald Trump and his administration have sent hundreds of men to an El Salvadoran megaprison, signed agreements to deport people of varying nationalities to Uganda, Eusatini, South Sudan and Rwanda, countries these people have no connection to, and passed a bill which gives $130 billion of federal funding to hire ICE agents, build detention centers, and fund the border patrol. The U.S. government has increased ICE arrests by 25% and is increasing detention. 

In this blog, we look at the narrative accompanying these actions by studying the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) posts on X (@dhsgov) and analyzing the content in contrast with previous U.S. administrations. While its actions have already caused harm and spread fear among both migrants and U.S. citizens, the Trump administration’s discourse also causes ripple effects in society and the region that demonizes migrant and refugee people, especially from the Global South, and leaves them unprotected. This anti-immigrant narrative of the DHS, although worse during this administration, fits into the same broader framework of racism and discrimination that U.S. governments have used throughout history to promote fascist policies against other groups, particularly African Americans and Native Americans.

Trump’s narrative: dehumanizing “the enemy”

The current Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses the words “illegal,” “criminal,” and “alien” around 12 times more in its posts on X than the previous Trump administration and ~105 times more than the Biden administration, which never used the word “alien” in the posts we were able to scrape. A glance at three word clouds showing the most commonly used words from a sample of the DHS posts under Trump’s 2017-2020 administration, Biden’s administration (2020-2024), and Trump’s 2025 administration exemplifies this radicalization of language:

Word Cloud of 938 Posts from Nov. 2017 – Nov. 2020 First Trump Administration’s DHS X Account.

Word Cloud of 2,506 Posts from Nov. 2021-Nov. 2024 Biden Administration DHS X Account.

Word Cloud of 1,588 Posts from Jan 20-July 28, 2025 Trump Administration’s DHS X Account.

Immigrants as “criminals” and objects

While words like “alien”—which is a relic from the British imperial legal system—are necessarily dehumanizing (now “alien” signifies “extraterrestrial” more than “foreigner”), other descriptors such as “illegal” (as a noun) and “criminal” work to normalize associative biases between immigrants and crime. The association of immigrants and crime furthers misinformation, considering that two centuries of data confirms that immigrants consistently commit fewer crimes than US-born citizens. Amidst the Trumpian erosion of due process, this association is also a dangerous attempt at legitimizing the administration’s kidnapping of authorized residents and arrests of innocent Latinos.

In fact, the Trump administration is doing more to promote this association than simply changing their vocabulary. Unlike posts from previous administrations, many current @dhsgov posts are images of “criminals” who have been deported with descriptions of their crimes (e.g. over 30+ of these posts in the past two weeks). These pictures are almost entirely representative of Latinos, Asians and Africans who are portrayed as “pedophiles,” drug traffickers, and other criminals. 

Yet beyond misinformation, these tweets—coupled with AI images, memes, and short-form viral content—have an air of nonchalance which seems to gamify immigration crackdowns and treat deportees not as humans but as objects. Not only is the word “alien” used redundantly and intentionally to describe non-citizens, but adjectives like “grumpy” and “little” are demeaning. In an administration where the head of ICE says that deportation should be like “Amazon Prime for human beings,” posts that not only normalize but cheerfully applaud the degradation and mistreatment of non-citizens (and some citizens, too) only serve to legitimize and encourage the growing violence being used against immigrants and people of color in the United States.

Racialized and “idealized” homeland

The DHS’s twitter account has also begun a series of posts showing old paintings of the American frontier, calling it a “homeland” to be proud and protective of. John Gast’s American Progress was the subject of one of these posts, which subtitled the painting’s controversial depiction of Native Americans fleeing white settlers with a call for a return to “Homeland Heritage.” Posts like these are not only intentionally ignorant of the genocidal history of the United States, but they also serve to promote white nationalism and social conformity by implying that immigrants and people of color do not belong to an idealized moral vision of the United States.

An image from an X post by the United States Department of Homeland Security on July 23, 2025 that’s caption reads: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

In fact, racialized images of the “American way of life” coupled with propaganda and images of deported people of color only serve as an expansion of modern racism, which since the civil rights era has “emphasized… that blacks were habitual violators of ‘cherished American values,’ especially the American work ethic” and has since returned in the form of anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) efforts and moves to cut social welfare. On the DHS’ twitter, images of pastoral America only serve to push immigrants of color out of this idealized and racial moral framework.

How does this discourse further an authoritarian agenda?

In Dejusticia’s recent publication on The Intersection of Migration with Authoritarian and Illiberal Tendencies, we outline a few of the ways that governments address migration in an authoritarian or illiberal way. For instance, instrumentalizing migrants to promote nationalism or as scapegoats for the country’s problems; making migration an issue of national security; and portraying migrants as criminals and threats. These practices tend to negatively impact the inclusion, protection, and humane treatment of migrants. 

The authoritarian implication of the Trump administration’s style of messaging is twofold. It serves to instrumentalize migrants to promote nationalism and further the government’s political agenda. As seen in the examples of idealized and racialized images of homeland, the posts imply that immigrants do not belong in an ideal America. Misinformation is also used in authoritarian settings to “reframe violence as protection.” In this case, the U.S. government is further painting migration as an issue that must be governed through a security and military lens. This can be seen in DHS posts that paint all immigrants as “aliens” and “criminals” and which claim to be “saving lives” through military deployment to detain and deport people.

Beyond this, the Trump administration’s narrative normalizes violence against political enemies, including migrants, reframes violence as protection, and denies the legitimacy of the political opposition (for example, by gamifying and trivializing immigration and using memes).

Countering the narrative as a political strategy

Alongside its policy and actions that deny rights, the Trump administration’s propaganda must not be overlooked. It was Václav Havel, one of the liberators of Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Union, who noted that in an authoritarian regime, slogans can come to form a “panorama of everyday life.” In a world where the Trump administration’s messaging becomes normalized and not scrutinized, we too risk becoming numb to the violence, ethnonationalism, and dehumanization that is forming the backbone of an increasingly authoritarian political regime in the United States.

Calling out and countering this narrative is essential to curb not only the Trump administration’s form of migration control, but also deter people from believing its propaganda and other countries from following its lead. It’s essential to clarify the facts related to crime and point to the benefits of migrants for a country’s political, social and economic wellbeing. Humanizing people who migrate as just that—people—with real lives, family, feelings, dreams, is necessary for a thriving society that protects everyone and their rights and not just a few. 

And as leaders like Trump instrumentalize migrants in order to shine a disingenuous light on history and the foundations of the country, we must call it out as false, nationalistic propaganda used to exclude. We must also counter the narrative to avoid further democratic backsliding and the removal of rights for even more people. Instead of a normal day with masked actors kidnapping people off of the street, our hope is that, on a normal day in the US, you can go to work, school, a restaurant or your home knowing that you are safe and will not be hurt or taken away from your loved ones.