Recruitment Standards and Future Implications

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With so much included in your stay, they make it truly easy to have a stress free family vacation. Just pack your bags and they'll do the rest Mohunk. com O theMedia is supported by Eagles Crest Advisors, taking a holistic approach to financial planning, helping you create strategies that align with your goals. Whether you're saving for retirement or purchasing a home, they help to guide your decision making with personalized advice. More at eaglescrestadvisors dot com Hey, you're listening to the onn the Media Midwek podcast. I'm Michael Loinger For a second week, reports of inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall in New Jersey are drawing protesors and camera crews. So protesters outside an immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center showed up to stand in solidarity with detainees who have been holding a hunger strike for between demonstrators and officers have actually gotten pretty violent. Last night, we got images of officers using their batons to push back the crowd. The confrontations escalated with tear gas and explosive devices being used to break up the crowds A handful of journalists and dozens of protesters have been arrested New Jersey Senator Andy Kim was pepper sprayed by federal agents when he tried to de escalate tensions between IC agents and demonstrators Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security head Mark Wayne Mullin has blamed the usual suspects. These riders are organized. These iders are sponsored by somebody. We see Antifa flags out there.'re not just exercising their First Amendment Under this Trump administration, ISIA's operations have ballooned. making it the highest funded U. S. law enforcement agency Last July, in the so called one Big Beautiful Bill act, Congress tripled ISIA's annual budget from about ten billion dollars to roughly thirty billion dollars, which includes roughly one hundred million dollars for what the agency calls wartime recruitment Drew Harwell is a technology reporter for the Washington Post I spoke to him for an interview we first aired earlier this year after he obtained a variety of files from ICE employees about the effort including one called a quote surge hiring marketing strategy document which lays out in very precise detail all the ways ICE wants to solicit new recruits, including producing a ton of advertisements. The ads are broken up a couple of different ways. One, you have the classic kind of Americana nostalgia ads that basically read like propaganda from World War O You know, white people on the frontier fighting these invaders, Uncle Sam features prominently. Then you have this other kind of mix that's this very modern, memy, edgy kind of campaign that's all action movie posters, video games, the Halo video game features prominently. It makes this policy issue of immigration into this game this battle But just to like zoom in on the halo ad, on the Department of Homeland Security's Instagram, we saw an image with the words destroy the flood For those who haven't played Halo, which is a hugely popular video game series, humans are basically fighting a parasitic alien. called the flood that takes over living things and turns them into zombies. I mean, this is like an extremely dehumanizing lens through which to talk about non citizens It is dehumanizing. They're trying to attract young people who are online, who need a job and will want to join IC. But we see the footage of what these deportation actions really look like, right? There's a much more human aspect to it in reality than there is in these posters, which just kind of reduce it to something you can laugh about. And I want to get to who these ideal recruits are. But it's not just Gen Z and it's not just on Instagram. Up until recently, you could hear ads running on Spotify. In too many cities, dangerous illegals walk free as police are forced to stand down, join IC, and help us catch the worst of the worst. You can see recruitment ads on local TV across the country Join the mission to protect America Bonuses up to fifty thousand dollars and generous benefits. You can find similar ads on Hulu, HBO Max, Snapchat YouTube Yeah, and I remember growing up seeing the military Army of One ads that made a similar point where you could be the knight on the front lines. And there were TV commercials. Now, you know, these ads are everywhere. so pervasive that SNL did a sketch last October with Tina Fe as Christy Noome and Amy Pohler as Pam Bondi. Do you need a jump now Yeah, Are you a big, tough guy? Yeah. Tough enough for the army or police? No. But do you take supplements that you bought at a gas station? Daily. Do you likeain zip ties because people in your life don't trust you with keys? You know it. Then buckle up and slap on some Oakle's big boy, Wlcome to Ice I think it's worth mentioning that after that sketch, the DHS X account clipped like the first ten seconds of it to make another ad, which raises something kind of odd about what IC is up to. The New Yorker reported this month that the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly used pop songs over some of its recruitment ads by artists like Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and even a Siza Parody song from an appearance on SNL You'll hear this music over footage of IS arrests Rodrigo, Carpenter and Cza have denounced these videos as hateful, evil, and quote unquote peak dark, respectively K kinda seems like IC is thriving off of these responses, intentionally trolling famous people to try to drive more headlines and virality Carly And know we had gotten some internal messages from IC where they talk about, well, we don't really have the rights to this music, Maybe it's not the best idea. And members of the IC team who's putting these out basically say they don't care. This has been something that the administration has been very clear about. They like trolling the libs. They like being out there smashing people in the face every day. They want to go viral. People who agree with it tend to share it because they think it's funny. People who hate it and despise it share it as well to show their disgust too the algorithm, it's all the same It's just kind of silly in a way because what's happened in these instances is the celebrity will get really mad about it, The video will be pulled offline, and it becomes kind of a controversy. Maybe that works for DHS and IC because people are talking about them, but then they've wasted all this time on a piece of content that nobody can actually see. I think the big question is whether any of this actually works general polls of people's sentiment toward Trump's immigration policy, he's way underwater. The social media campaign of being very aggressive and in your face, it hasn't reversed that, right? It hasn't made people as a whole support Trump's immigration policy. Maybe the strategy is being driven by very online people who love controlling people love being edgy, but is that actually good policy for government And and what are the implications here? It kind of feels like F chan marketing for people who also grew up on F Chan. I'm thinking of one of these ads the Intercept reported on. that IC posted just two days after Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. It's an image on the Department of Homeland Security's Instagram that reads, we'll have our home again. Which is just innocuous nativist language until you realize that that phrase is the title of a song by a group called Pine Tree Riots that's been embraced in neo Nazi spaces online for quite some time. And the lyrics to that song were the opening to a manifesto posted by a white supremacist who in twenty twenty three shot up a Florida dollar general and killed three black people. Why post that dog whistle if you're not trying actively to recruit white supremacists There's been enough of these examples now that it's impossible to say that this is all coincidental. DHS and Icean we have brought this stuff up to them. They have said, o, you're going to the Nazi thing again, how tiring. But it doesn't really explain why this keeps happening. You don't just accidentally use Nazi sauce, Tp over your feet and accidentally use far right dog whistle means. I think part of it is that Some of these people come from Republican policy shops, Republican press shops that were very online. They came up into this environment where they were young edge lords, right? Part of what this document suggested also was that they were going to be going to pro IC influencers, so creators on Rumble and Snapchat and YouTube and Instagram paying the money to get the message out about recruiting. So there's definitely a big online component. The part that really jumped out to me and felt interesting was how they've moved into the real world, where they're using techniques like geofencing, where they look at a real world place like rodeos, gun shows, UFC fights, NASCAR races, hunting shows. They're drawing basically a circle around these areas. Anybody who sets foot into those events is going to get a popa bag on their phone. They're also doing billboards and bus stops. So it really struck me as a pretty sophisticated effort. I talked to marketing experts who do this for real companies and they felt it seemed exactly like the kinds of methods you would if you were trying to sell Coca Cola, but they're applying it to this government agency that's trying to carry out the biggest mass deportation in American history becausecause they believe that the people attending these types of events arere their prime demographic Yeah, and the document they talk about their target market being people who are conservative, people who see themselves as patriots, people who listen to patriotic right wing podcasts, but also people interested in military affairs, guns and tactical gear, people who are really into watching fitness influencers. someome of this is not super new has traditionally when they've wanted to backfill positions that they've lost to attrition or retirement, they've often got people who have trained as cops in local police departments and sherheriff's offices who want a federal job, but they need so many people now that they're trying to cast a really wide net and going after people who may not have the training and may just be some guys scrolling social media What evidence do we have DHS is not being so judicious in who they allow into the ranks. There has been some reporting on this, especially by people like Nick Mirff at the Atlantic, where they've said they're getting a lot of applications in, and they're getting a lot of people who are expressing interest in these jobs, specifically because IC is offering fifty thousand dollars signing bonuses and help with student loans Student loan reimbursement programs, they're basically throwing money at new applicants. And IC is telling us this advertising campaign is working. They're getting all the applications they need, one hundred thousand or more applications. And yet the reporting from people like Nick Miroff and the Washington Post as well has found that people are coming in, they're not able to pass the fitness requirements. They're hitting all kinds of roadblocks in terms of the testing We talk to people who are former DHS IC officials. they've said they're shifting the bar to a point where they're bringing in people who are not going to be great candidates that may end up on the street without the kind of experience you would hope for in these high pressure situations. So it's possible that to fill this giant mandate and to fill this hole, they're expanding their standards to a level that people aren't comfortable In fact, there was that viral story from independent journalist Laura Jadid who wrote about how she was allegedly hired by ICE after visiting a career fair in Texas last summer. Here she is on democracy now. I went in, I handed in my resume, which was I did a skills based resume. I'm a veter. I serve tuts in Afghanistan. So on the surface, their resume looked pretty good had a very brief interview, took all of six minutes, Then I left, assuming I would never hear back because I'm a very Googleable person. I am the only lawa Juded on the internet. and I make no secret of how I feel about IC She goes on to say that she initially missed the email from ICE and never filled out the paperwork that they requested with that offer, stuff like a background check or an affidavit saying she'd never committed domestic crimes. But then a few weeks later, she says I got a message from Lab Corp saying that ICE wanted me to do a drug test And the ninet days after that, you know I was just curious, had they processed the drug test yet So I logged onto the IC hiring portal and not only Did the drug test not seem to be relevant? I was listed as having joined IC as of three days earlier. Which is wild to me because she has reported critically on this agency for a long time. So if the agency would not look into the most superficial information about this potential recruit What are they missing from everybody else? You mentioned that poll numbers would have us believe that there's actually a sizable backlash to ISIS activity across the country That said, DHS is claiming big new numbers, upwards of two hundred twenty thousand job applications in five months Does that seem legit to you You know, it's their numbers. I don't have any reason not to trust them. You know, number of applications is not necessarily a proxy for perfect candidates or are being hired, right? Some of these might be repeat applications, some of these might be applications that don't work And again, some of this is probably a reflection of the fifty thousand dollars signing bonuses. I mean, some of these deportation officer jobs pay fifty thousand dollars salarary. So you're basically doubling the salary year one. I think it's impossible to disentangle the success of this kind of recruitment strategy from the actual advertising. We just don't know if one is connecting to the other So many of these examples are incredibly dark. I guess I'm trying to make sense of what it means exactly