Inside ICE’s Push to Go Viral
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2026
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many people were surprised that ICE officer Jonathan Ross was filming with his phone when he shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. But Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell was leaked thousands of internal ICE messages that show the agency is obsessed with creating viral videos, and is using arrests of immigrants slapped with “hooky” captions and pop music to feed their content machine.
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Here are Drew's Washington Post stories:
Guests:
- Drew Harwell, Washington Post technology reporter
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I don't know if you've seen any posts on ICE's social media accounts in the last year, or the Department of Homeland Security's account, which ICE is part of. |
| 0:14.9 | The posts are aimed at making ICE's violence and aggression look cool, I guess, and to make fun of the people the agency's |
| 0:21.8 | targeting. They've been posting memes that make crude jokes about immigrants, a meme with a white |
| 0:26.8 | nationalist song, lots of mugshots, lots of reposts of clips from right-wing outlets, as well as short |
| 0:32.8 | videos produced by ICE itself, showing massed ice agents tackling, chasing, questioning, handcuffing, |
| 0:39.3 | and perp walking people in streets and parking lots across the country. |
| 0:43.5 | They'll set these videos to pop or rap music. |
| 0:46.2 | Slap them with a hilarious caption, like, Minnesota's weather is cloudy with a 100% chance of ice. |
| 0:53.2 | Ha. |
| 0:55.0 | Sometimes the agency will claim the people in the videos have serious criminal records. |
| 0:59.2 | Other times they don't, and it's not clear what, if anything, the people whose faces are |
| 1:03.8 | being blasted across the internet by the government have done wrong. |
| 1:08.6 | We know ICE has been picking up lots of people who don't have criminal histories and also American citizens. |
| 1:14.6 | These are mostly people of color in the videos and mugshots and memes. |
| 1:19.6 | The Supreme Court said last year that for now, while they deliberate a larger ruling, |
| 1:23.6 | ICE agents can use someone's race, the language they speak, or the fact that they work |
| 1:28.6 | at a low-income job as reasons to stop them. Congress and the Trump administration have |
| 1:34.6 | tripled ICE's budget to nearly $30 billion, and a huge bucket of funds are being poured into |
| 1:40.6 | the agency's content creation and media strategy. The government is using taxpayer money to churn out videos and memes that valorize ICE agents |
| 1:49.9 | acting like bullies, make immigration enforcement look like a violent game, and dehumanize |
| 1:55.7 | immigrants and people of color, and lately, Americans who are protesting in support of them. The Department of Homeland |
| 2:03.3 | Security, DHS, has pumped out more than 400 videos on their account alone, and that was all |
... |
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