The Trump administration has been accused of ramping up “Nazi dog whistling” as tensions escalate over its aggressive law enforcement tactics across U.S. cities.
As concerns mount in the wake of last week’s ICE shooting in Minneapolis, Donald Trump’s key departments are increasingly pushing out social media posts, recruitment videos, and photos of cabinet secretaries with extremist or fascist overtones, including some that appear to be straight out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook.
The Department of Labor, for instance, put out a post on X overnight with the words “America is for Americans,” reminiscent of the “Germany is for Germans” slogan aligned with Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi party.
This came days after an earlier post which read “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”, echoing another Nazi slogan—“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”, or “One People, One Empire, One Leader”.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has also come under fire for standing behind a podium bearing the phrase “One of Ours, All Of Yours” during a press conference about deportation operations.
The event took place in New York, one day after the fatal ICE shooting of mother-of-three Renee Good.
Observers and historians say the words on the podium echo the notion of collective punishment, which underpinned atrocities such as the World War 2 massacre in which Nazis killed civilians in retaliation after an SS officer’s assassination.
“DHS, and now other departments, are hardly bothering with dog whistles anymore,” Wendy Via from the Global Project Against Extremism and Hate told The Daily Beast.
“They’re using blatant white supremacist and Nazi references in their imagery and slogans in an attempt to recruit staff, and they don’t even try to defend their actions. Their shameful reincarnation of white America propaganda from decades ago perfectly illustrates this administration’s view on what America should look like.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the administration for comment. But the images have particular potency given the growing militarization across U.S. cities where tensions between law enforcement and citizens are escalating.
Minneapolis has been ground zero for those tensions ever since ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good three times as she attempted to drive away.
Since then, arrests and aggressive tactics by ICE and the Border Patrol have been captured on viral videos by residents, business owners and immigrant workers.
The administration insists officers have federal immunity to carry out their operations, and have backed the officer’s actions as self-defense, while painting Good as a “domestic terrorist” whose actions led to her own death.
“At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening.
But critics have long warned that the dark imagery used by the administration to recruit ICE officers, which is often shared among extremist groups on Telegram networks, is part of the problem.
As the training of recruits also comes under the spotlight, one recent video showed an ICE agent pulling out his pistols and pointing them at the face of a protester at point-blank range before putting them back; another showed a group of officers breaking into the home of a woman during an immigration operation.
“I don’t know how much people are seeing outside of Minnesota, but I can assure you it’s worse than you can imagine,” one local resident, Rebecca Martin, wrote on Threads.
“We are not okay. They’re kidnapping citizens, going door to door in many neighborhoods, knocking down doors, shoving and threatening bystanders. Kids are not going to school, and people of color are afraid to leave their homes and carry their citizenship papers with them. ICE is literally everywhere.”
The imagery is not the first time the Trump administration’s messaging has come under fire.
Earlier this year, California Governor Gavin Newsom accused Noem of “pure Nazi dog whistling” after her department shared a post he claimed had two “H”s back to back - a subtle reference to “HH,” or shorthand for “Heil Hitler”.
“Disgusting,” he wrote. “Call it out. Every. Single. Time.”
DHS has previously responded to claims of dog whistling by saying such accusations are “tiresome” and defending its messaging as “unapologetically proud of American history”.
