Redefining the Homeland Through Visual Propaganda in Contemporary America

Uncle Sam points an accusatory finger directly at the viewer, his expression stern and uncompromising. Behind him, the Statue of Liberty appears damaged, her torch dimmed, and surrounded by text reading ‘Protect Her’ and ‘Restore America’. Another post lists crimes attributed to undocumented migrants alongside the slogan ‘Report Foreign Invaders’.[1] Uncle Sam’s pointing finger does not invite. It demands. The damaged Liberty does not welcome but calls for protection. Nothing in the visual register of these images suggests bureaucratic process or administrative function. That they are in fact recruitment materials, published by federal enforcement agencies to attract new officers, makes their ideological freight all the more significant.

In the first year of its second term, the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) circulated a series of recruitment images through their official Instagram accounts. The posts formed part of a broader recruitment drive following increased congressional authorisation for enforcement personnel, establishing the administration’s immigration enforcement priorities at the outset of its tenure. Rather than presenting neutral employment information, the campaign relied on emotional appeal, nationalist symbolism, and moral urgency. Immigration enforcement was framed not as an administrative function but as a civilisational obligation. The campaign, therefore, represents a significant intensification of how the American state communicates authority, legitimacy, and belonging.

This article argues that the DHS and ICE Instagram campaign constitutes a contemporary example of how state political art is used to both construct the idea of the homeland and to legitimise internal security institutions. The concept of the homeland in American political discourse has been shaped by competing traditions, with the civic ideal of constitutional principles, democratic pluralism, and inclusivity existing in persistent tension with exclusionary ethnocultural strands.[2] The civic strand of this tradition positioned the nation as a perpetual project of becoming rather than a fixed cultural inheritance. Although the imagery draws heavily on nationalist aesthetics associated with the current Trump administration, its ongoing circulation demonstrates the persistence of these visual strategies within federal bureaucratic institutions. The campaign reveals how state agencies deploy nostalgia, symbolism, and moral binaries to shape public perceptions of immigration and enforcement. By situating these images within the historiography of nationalism, state-building, and political aesthetics, this article reveals how visual culture functions as a mechanism of governance, and how the meaning of homeland is being actively reworked from a civic ideal into a cultural possession requiring defence.

The use of political art by states has a long history. Governments have repeatedly relied on visual media to mobilise populations, recruit personnel, and define threats. During the First and Second World Wars, recruitment posters in the United States and Europe fused patriotism with moral duty. In the twentieth century, authoritarian regimes employed political art to legitimise repression and to naturalise exclusion. In Nazi Germany, monumental aesthetics and symbolic ritual transformed political authority into moral necessity, rendering persecution as the defence of a sacred national community. In the Soviet Union, socialist realist imagery similarly mobilised idealised representations of labour and collective identity to naturalise the coercive apparatus of the state. Across these contexts, visual culture served not merely as decoration but as an instrument of political power.

What distinguishes the DHS campaign is not the novelty of its techniques but, rather, their deployment within a contemporary democratic state, directed at domestic audiences during peacetime. This is not uniquely American. Similar visual strategies have been employed by far-right parties in European democracies. Nicole Doerr’s analysis of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, for example, identifies the deployment of ethno-nationalist imagery, anti-Islam rhetoric, and gendered representations of the nation as a woman requiring protection from cultural outsiders, strategies that closely parallel the rhetorical logic of the DHS campaign.[3] 

What is notable in the American case is the adoption of these techniques by federal enforcement agencies themselves rather than political parties alone. The United States has its own history of exclusionary nativist visual culture, from the anti-immigration imagery of the 1920s to Cold War era security communications. What distinguishes the present campaign is not the nativism itself but its combination with social media distribution, the embedding of extremist coded language within official federal communications, and the deployment of recruitment imagery to perform ideological work that formal policy language could not sustain. The campaign should thus be understood not as a novel departure but as the continuation of established visual strategies through contemporary digital media, now operationalised within the institutional apparatus of the state itself.

The political intelligibility of this campaign is inseparable from the Trump administration’s immigration stance during its current term. Immigration has been framed not primarily as either a regulatory or a labour-market issue, but as a civilisational and cultural threat in which enforcement is cast as the defence of national identity rather than the administration of law. This orientation privileges symbolism, loyalty, and exclusion over procedural legality. The DHS and ICE imagery translates this framing into visual form, allowing it to circulate without the friction of policy debate or legal justification. That this framing was legible beyond its intended audience is evidenced by the breadth and intensity of the public response it provoked.

Public reaction was sharply polarised. Organisations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, publicly condemned the imagery, identifying the posts as referencing neo-Nazi and white supremacist material.[4] Several Democratic lawmakers took formal action, with Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Becca Balint writing letters to Meta and Google demanding that they end their digital advertising partnerships with DHS, citing the use of federal funds to run recruitment content that relies on white nationalist imagery and rhetoric.[5] The controversy generated substantial media coverage, with major outlets such as NPR and CBC publishing analyses of the visual rhetoric and its historical antecedents, tracing the lineage of specific slogans and images to the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi publishing, and white supremacist online spaces.[6] This public attention amplified the campaign’s reach well beyond its original recruitment audience, drawing mixed responses from ordinary Instagram users and transforming the recruitment imagery into contested national symbols. Understanding how recruitment imagery acquires the force of national symbolism requires paying attention to the deeper mechanisms by which nations are imagined and represented.

The theoretical framework of this article draws on scholarship that treats the state as both an administrative and a symbolic actor. Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as an imagined community provides an essential foundation. Anderson argues that nations persist because members share representations that allow them to imagine collective belonging despite social distance.[7] Visual symbols play a central role in this process by condensing history, territory, and identity into recognisable forms. In the DHS campaign, this condensation is performed through two iconic figures. Uncle Sam carries the accumulated weight of American military and civic history, his pointing gesture evoking a tradition of national obligation stretching back to the First World War, whilst the Statue of Liberty condenses the nation’s self-image as a space of arrival, asylum, and democratic promise. By recruiting these figures into the context of enforcement, the campaign draws on the emotional and historical legibility they already possess, redirecting their accumulated meanings toward exclusion and defence rather than welcome and inclusion.

George Mosse’s work on the nationalisation of the masses further clarifies the political role of aesthetics. Mosse argues that nationalism sacralises politics through ritual, myth, and visual order, transforming political authority into moral necessity.[8] Symbols such as monuments and allegorical figures acquire normative force by presenting the nation as timeless and unified. In this framework, threats to the nation appear as moral violations rather than political disagreements. The DHS campaign reflects this tradition by framing immigration enforcement as the defence of a sacred homeland.

Where Anderson and Mosse explain how nations are imagined and sacralised through visual form, James C Scott’s analysis of state legibility explains how such imagery simultaneously serves the administrative imperatives of governance. Scott argues that modern states seek to render societies legible by reducing complexity into administratively manageable categories.[9] Visual culture can perform this simplification by collapsing diverse social realities into stark binaries. In the posts disseminated by DHS, immigration is rendered as a singular threat rather than a multifaceted, legal, and economic phenomenon. This visual reduction facilitates the expansion of coercive authority by making enforcement appear obvious and necessary.

Charles Tilly’s work on state formation situates these dynamics within a broader historical pattern. Tilly argued that states consolidate power through the mobilisation of coercive capacity in response to threat, a logic that extends beyond external war to the construction of internal enemies as justifications for authority.[10] The DHS campaign exemplifies this logic, but with a significant contemporary inflection, mobilising citizens as opposed to standing armies. By addressing viewers as moral actors with an obligation to report, surveil, and support enforcement operations, the imagery recruits ordinary Americans into the coercive apparatus of the state. Immigration is presented not as a regulatory challenge requiring administrative management but as an existential danger demanding civic participation in its suppression. Visual rhetoric substitutes for military mobilisation by producing a symbolic battlefield within the nation itself, in which every citizen is a potential auxiliary of state power.

Functionally, the campaign operates to normalise enforcement authority, to morally valorise participation in immigration control, and to align agency identity with executive priorities. It also serves to reinforce institutional legitimacy for an agency that has been the subject of sustained public controversy and legal challenge. Recruitment imagery framed as moral defence elevates enforcement from bureaucratic labour to civic calling. These functions are politically consequential regardless of whether they reflect explicit intent.

Turning to the images themselves, the Statue of Liberty occupies a central role across the campaign. Historically associated with migration, asylum, and civic inclusion, Liberty is reimagined as vulnerable and in need of protection. In several posts, she appears damaged, under restoration, or accompanied by slogans such as ‘Protect Her’ and ‘Restore America’. This transformation recodes a symbol of openness into one of defence. The gendered dynamics of this representation warrant attention. By feminising the nation as a woman requiring protection, the imagery activates patriarchal anxieties about possession and violation. Women become symbolic property to be defended, and immigration is framed as a threat not merely to territory but to gendered ownership. This rhetorical move has deep roots in nationalist discourse, where the nation-as-woman trope reinforces both gender-essentialised hierarchies and exclusionary boundaries.[11] The homeland is no longer a space of arrival but a possession under threat.

Uncle Sam functions as the primary agent of moral address and redress. Drawing on early twentieth-century recruitment posters, the DHS adaptations intensify his accusatory posture. He points directly at the viewer, he bears lists of crimes attributed to undocumented migrants, and he calls on citizens to report foreign invaders. Civic duty is redefined as participation in surveillance and enforcement. The citizen is interpellated not as a democratic actor but as an auxiliary of state power.

The aesthetic choices underpinning the campaign reinforce its message. Muted colour palettes, distressed textures, and retro typography evoke moments of perceived national unity. As Mosse has observed, nostalgia functions politically by borrowing authority from the past while obscuring its exclusions. The DHS imagery invokes historical legitimacy without acknowledging the coercive realities of those periods. The past is aestheticised rather than interrogated.

The timing of the campaign's circulation, in the opening weeks of the Trump administration’s second term, is particularly significant. Published when the administration's immigration enforcement priorities were being established, the campaign translated those priorities into visual form before they were fully visible in practice. That a federal enforcement agency deployed civilisational framing and exclusionary symbolism from the outset suggests that this orientation was not incidental but institutionalised. Visual culture operated alongside formal policy language, circulating ideological content without the friction of legislative debate or legal scrutiny.

The homeland imagined in these images is culturally narrow and normatively prescriptive. Captions reference forefathers, the English language, and a singular American spirit. Quotations attributed to historical figures are deployed to imply that belonging is conditional upon cultural conformity. This is precisely the dynamic Ernest Gellner identified in his analysis of nationalism: the drive to achieve congruence between political and cultural boundaries, such that the state and the nation it governs are imagined as coextensive.[12] The state positions itself as the arbiter of authentic national identity.

The choice of Instagram as a dissemination platform intensifies the political effects of this imagery. As a platform organised around visual consumption rather than political commentary, Instagram embeds state messaging within the everyday stream of personal photography and lifestyle content, normalising ideological material through proximity to the mundane. Engagement metrics are structured to favour polarising and affectively charged content, which risks creating the appearance of organic consensus around state priorities. State communication conducted through social media is shaped by visibility and affect in ways that sit uneasily alongside the impersonal, rule-bound conduct on which bureaucratic legitimacy depends.

Where Scott and Tilly illuminate how visual culture expands coercive authority, Max Weber’s theory of bureaucratic legitimacy explains what is at stake institutionally when enforcement agencies adopt overtly ideological imagery. Modern administration derives its legitimacy from adherence to impersonal authority and procedural consistency.[13] Departure from this principle risks eroding perceptions of neutrality, a concern that is particularly acute for ICE, an agency that has faced sustained public controversy, legal challenge, and accusations of racial profiling throughout its history. When recruitment imagery frames enforcement as civilisational defence rather than administrative duty, it risks reshaping how officers understand their own role. Officers recruited through appeals to moral obligation rather than professional vocation may come to understand themselves as defenders of a cultural homeland rather than administrators of law, with consequences for how discretion is exercised in the field. Public trust becomes contingent on ideological alignment rather than institutional accountability, and the basis of legitimate authority shifts from the rule of law to the defence of a particular vision of the nation.

The DHS and ICE Instagram campaign reveals how the meaning of homeland is being actively reworked within the institutional apparatus of the contemporary American state. It imagines a nation, sacralises its defence, simplifies its enemies, and mobilises its citizens, not through legislation or force alone, but through visual culture circulated on a social media platform. That federal enforcement agencies have adopted these techniques, historically associated with wartime mobilisation and authoritarian governance, within a peacetime democratic state represents a significant escalation in how institutional authority is communicated and legitimised. The campaign both recruits enforcement personnel and prescribes the terms of belonging. Its images are evidence that the homeland is not only administered, but also imagined into existence.

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Ray Morgan

Ray Morgan is a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge whose work examines how Russian and Soviet states justified and projected their authority across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His Masters research investigates the economic logic underpinning Russian imperial expansion into the South Caucasus, and his forthcoming doctoral work extends that interest into the Cold War era, examining how Soviet, American, and British states used visual media to construct and contest political legitimacy.

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[1] See for some examples of such posts Caleb Kieffer and RG Cravens, ‘Homeland Security Deploys White Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant Graphics to Recruit’ (Southern Poverty Law Center, 28 August 2025) <https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dhs-white-nationalist-anti-immigrant-social-media/> accessed 22 March 2026. Several posts consulted in the preparation of this analysis appear to have since been removed from the official accounts, suggesting that the imagery proved legible beyond its intended recruitment audience in ways that required subsequent management. That these posts appear to have been removed rather than defended indicates the limits of the campaign’s official framing as straightforward recruitment material.

[2] Rogers M Smith, ‘The “American Creed” and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the United States’ (1988) 41 Western Political Quarterly 225.

[3] Nicole Doerr, ‘The Visual Politics of the Alternative for Germany (AfD): Anti-Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Gendered Images’ (2021) 10 Social Sciences 20.

[4] Kieffer and Cravens (n 1); Ayesha Rascoe, ‘As white nationalist slogans, images, and memes become normalized, can we go back?’ (NPR, 15 February 2026) <https://www.npr.org/2026/02/15/nx-s1-5711537/as-white-nationalist-slogans-images-and-memes-become-normalized-can-we-go-back> accessed 22 March 2026.

[5] Pramila Jayapal and Becca Balint, ‘Reps Jayapal and Balint Push Meta and Google to End ICE Ad Partnerships Using White Nationalist Propaganda’ (22 January 2026) <https://jayapal.house.gov/2026/01/22/reps-jayapal-and-balint-push-meta-and-google-to-end-ice-ad-partnerships-using-white-nationalist-propaganda/> accessed 22 March 2026.

[6] Stephen Fowler and Jude Joffe-Block, ‘Minnesota Shows What Happens When Governing and Content Creation Merge’ (NPR, 16 January 2026) <https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5675909> accessed 22 March 2026; Jonathan Montpetit, ‘ICE Nodding to Far-Right Extremists in Recruitment Posts, Experts Say’ (CBC News, 25 January 2026) <https://www.cbc.ca/news/ice-recruiting-9.7058294> accessed 22 March 2026.

[7] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso 1983).

[8] George L Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Howard Fertig 1975).

[9] James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press 1998).

[10] Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Blackwell 1992).

[11] Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (SAGE Publications 1997).

[12] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Cornell University Press 1983).

[13] Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (University of California Press 1978).