Meme Propaganda and Immigration Justice

The Christian Nationalist origins of an ICE meme

One of the changes from the first to the second Trump Administration has been the heavy use of memes and A.I. generated images to troll opponents on social media. The administration’s social media managers seem to have been given free rein to post whatever they think is funny, will generate traffic, and will “trigger the libs.” For example, the image of Trump as the new pope or the Studio Ghibli-style image of a woman being arrested. So I was not surprised, but I was shocked when I saw the following image posted by the Department of Homeland Security last week.

The fake poster is based on a real Korean War war bonds poster created by Japanese-American artist Yatuka Ohashi. I’m not sure how a foreign-born artist would feel about his work being used as propaganda for expelling “foreign invaders,” especially given the treatment of Japanese-Americans by the US government during WWII, but let’s set that historical irony aside for the moment.

What shocked me about this image is the use of war imagery (after all, the original poster was from the Korean War) and the language of “foreign invaders.” I am in favor of enforcing our just border laws and deporting violent criminals, but framing our immigration situation as a war is fundamentally inaccurate and dangerous. We are not at war. We are not being invaded by hostile enemies. This language is straight propaganda by our government. And as it turns out, this particular propaganda comes from someone in the dissident right (my description) or Christian Nationalist-adjacent movement (his description). In other words, our leaders are reusing propaganda created by deeply toxic elements on the far right. You can believe, as I do, in controlled borders and the importance of deporting violent criminals while still recognizing that the Trump Administration’s use of dissident right propaganda is dangerous and unjust.