ON JUNE 13, in a transparent attempt to piss out the fires lit by its inhumane treatment of detained migrants along the southern border, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took to Twitter to launch an online charm offensive. “Yesterday, ICE provided an extensive media tour of the agency’s dedicated housing unit for transgender women,” its feed boasted, followed by a series of photos purporting to show that a stay in one of its detention facilities was really little more than a cushy, taxpayer-funded sleep-away camp (never mind the fact that two trans women have died in ICE detention since May 2018). Pictures showed smiling women playing volleyball, browsing the library, getting their hair done.
The backlash was vicious and instant. One viral response by Brynn Tannehill featured a side-by-side comparison of an ICE photo featuring a woman stooped and gardening with another, older image of a prisoner watering plants––this one a propaganda shot taken at Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto and transit camp in what is now the Czech Republic that, between deportations to other camps and deaths within its walls, claimed over a hundred thousand lives.
The blatantly propagandistic images are disturbing enough on their own. But another layer, one largely absent from the outcry, is the exceeding weirdness of an ICE Twitter account in and of itself. Just as corporations aping humans have infiltrated the once-sacrosanct corners of the weird internet, government organizations have harnessed social media to project their power into the furthest reaches of cyberspace. Less than a decade after observers in the wake of the Arab Spring were proclaiming social media to be the ultimate tool for bottom-up democratic movements, these platforms have become so assimilated into the dominant structures of power that organizations responsible for enforcing the militarization of America’s borders and surveilling its residents can use them to swap pictures of #doggos.
There’s a taxonomy to government social media accounts, a tonal spectrum that runs the gamut from affected goofiness to pokerfaced martial posturing. At the former end stands the web presence of the Transportation Security Administration, whose cutesy captions and copious use of dad jokes call to mind the meme of Steve Buscemi walking up to a group of teenagers and asking, “How do you do, fellow kids?” “You’ve cat to be kitten me right meow!” begins one Instagram post accompanying a picture of two cats, before going on to detail the proper procedure for getting a pet carrier through security.
Another instructs readers to put any pepper spray they might be carrying into their checked luggage in a painfully rhythmless series of what the TSA claims are Shakespearean couplets. Many posts about airport regulations are shoehorned into bizarre time pegs in an effort to make their contents seem casual and of-the-moment: a tweet reminding readers about liquid limits for carry-on begins, “It’s #NationalDaiquiriDay!” Emoji-saturated messages instruct travelers that anyone carrying [certain forbidden items will be subject to police action].
The desire to seem hip can reach self-parodic extremes, as in one Instagram post that reads, “Getting caught while trying to fly with marijuana or cannabis-infused products can really harsh your mellow. Let us be blunt,” implying that while TSA doesn’t want to bust anyone for flying with pot, The Man is making them do it. It’s not always clear whether the leaden dorkiness of its content is ironic or sincere––or which of the two options would be worse. In any case, they’re hiring. [...]
Other government bodies are less eager to defang themselves in the eyes of the public, instead using their social media as yet another front on which to bullishly defend the Trump administration’s policies. Such is the case for ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, both of which use Instagram and Twitter more or less as bullhorns for ultraconservative immigration talking points. Posts by both agencies make frequent use of language like “illegal alien” or “criminal alien”; a recurring theme of ICE’s social media posts is the illegal activity (bonus points for crimes related to drugs or sex) of foreign nationals in the United States, such as the recent sentencing of El Chapo or reports that “human smugglers” were attempting to pass off a Guatemalan girl they had raped as part of a “fraudulent family unit,” clear apologia for Trump’s family separation policy. Such posts blatantly contribute to the demonization of immigrants—especially Latinx immigrants—as dangerous criminals who need to be prevented from entering the country at all costs, while character limits provide a useful excuse to excise context that might put a different spin on events. [...]