Officers gathered in paramilitary gear before a mass deportation effort in California. Photo by Getty Images/Mira Fox
By Mira Fox
July 14, 2025
In the Instagram video, uniformed border patrol personnel sling on vests and helmets. Grainy, night-vision footage of people, presumably migrants, moving through brush is spliced together with shots of helicopters hovering, all scored to a dark folk-harmony track that would sound at home in O Brother, Where Art Thou.
A twangy narration plays over the top: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying: Who shall I send, and who will go for us? And I said: Here am I; send me.”
The clip was posted not by a church or religious leader, but by the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol and the White House.
It’s nothing new for a government to make propaganda presenting their actions and policies as inspiring; Israel has been making videos of its military that feel like clips from Marvel movies for years, and using humor and memes to try to build goodwill. (The humor hasn’t always landed well.) The U.S. military, for its part, has long made recruitment videos that deploy action movie sequences to inspire young Americans to join the Army.
But the open invocation of the Bible to underscore the Trump administration’s deportation plan is new; the aesthetics of these videos suggest that the U.S.’s actions are not only exciting or noble, but also divinely ordained.
Not every post from DHS, Border Patrol or the White House cites the Bible, of course. Some are darkly joking memes, like one of a weightlifting skeleton with superimposed text reading: “My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations.” Ha ha! Others capitalize on social media trends like ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, videos meant to provoke a pleasant full-body tingle, usually using calming sounds, like whispering or gentle tapping; the White House version features the sound of handcuffs clanking.
Most posts are just pictures and videos of deportations, framed by cheery or triumphant messaging, including at least one set to the song “Ice, Ice, Baby.” A carousel of pictures of people being handcuffed by ICE agents is captioned “Summer Postcards from DHS” with a heart emoji. A video of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new detention facility in Florida, shows chain-link fencing around metal bunk beds, an electric guitar solo playing in the background.
Still, the video invoking religion is far from a one-off. Trump has been justifying his policies via references to God with increasing frequency, particularly since the attempted assassination at a campaign event. “He’s on a mission from God, and nothing can stop what’s coming” reads one black-and-white image of Trump striding through the night in a long black coat.
It feels almost too obvious to mention that this is a sign of the role that Christian nationalism is playing in driving Trump administration policies and priorities. Despite numerous stories of people with no gang connections or violent history being arrested and deported, or American citizens harassed or wrongfully detained, the Christian narrative frames the ICE agents as soldiers of God. It plays in an emotional, religious register that implies their actions must be righteous, however violent they might appear. After all, God’s ways may be mysterious, it seems to imply, so the only thing people can do is trust in God’s ordained messengers — who are, apparently, ICE agents and Trump.
Christianity is, of course, not the only trend in the Trump administration’s online messaging; a cruel style of online humor and extremism is also clearly playing a large role in the Trump administration’s messaging. But even these seemingly nonreligious memes are connected to a religious undercurrent.
The meme style the DHS and White House accounts are leveraging was built, in large part, by groypers, the followers of white supremacist Nick Fuentes. And Fuentes, who is Catholic, promotes a militant Christian nationalism that explicitly targets Jews. Even though many of the government’s posts do not overtly reference a Christian-run government, they are still, implicitly, tied to Christian nationalism; those who are in the know recognize the aesthetic symbolism.
But perhaps more important than whether a post is promoting Christian nationalism — an influence that has long been an obvious part of the Trump administration’s motivations and messaging — is the way that they normalize violent imagery. The more people are inundated by joking memes about people being beaten and handcuffed by U.S. government forces, the less startling they are. And the easier it is to believe that, perhaps, this is the way things have been since the beginning — just as God made them.
