The style is instantly familiar. The thick lines, the heroic poses and the stark pastel colour palettes all evoke a bygone era of national crisis, a country united against a foreign threat.

Though they might be mistaken for relics of the Second World War or fan-made parodies, these are official, contemporary recruitment materials from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This deliberate echo of 1940s wartime propaganda functions as a declaration. The US government is signaling that the debate on immigration is over and a war has begun.

The sourcing of this new propaganda is chillingly direct. One poster, captioned “Which way, American man?”, lifts its title verbatim from Which Way, Western Man?, an influential text published by the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

Another graphic urging citizens to “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS” was first popularised by a white nationalist social media account before the Department of Homeland Security adopted it for its own use.

'Help your country locate and arrest illegal aliens. To report criminal activity.' Photo: Homeland Security's Twitter account @DHSgov

The aesthetic is a weapon designed to dehumanise. It provides the visual context for a brutal message that immigrants are an “invasion of criminals and predators.”

This call to arms is aimed specifically at American police officers, urging them to leave their communities for a federal force dedicated to mass deportation.

The racial coding is stark, with recruitment posters overwhelmingly featuring heroic, white faces, while the agency’s social media posts celebrate arrests with the faces of Black and Brown individuals.

This is a concerted effort to “normalise the dehumanisation of immigrants,” says Lindsay Schubiner of the Western States Center, and to condition the public “to accept the heightened horrors and blatant disregard of civil rights that ICE is inflicting.”

The propaganda campaign is the public face of ICE’s transformation into a domestic army.

Following the passage of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” its budget skyrocketed to nearly $29 billion, making it the most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in US history. If ICE were a military, it would be the 17th richest in the world, worth about the same as Canada’s entire armed forces.

This force is directed by architects of the family separation policy like Tom Homan and guided by the ideology of figures like former White House adviser Stephen Miller, whose affinity for white nationalist literature is well-documented.

ICE now operates as an ideological project, armed with a military-scale budget and fuelled by propaganda pulled directly from the hateful doctrines of the regimes it now imitates.