Trump administration’s official social media accounts aim to provoke amid immigration raids

Morgan Weistling, an accomplished painter of cowboys and Old West frontier life, was vacationing with his family this month when he got a surprising message from a friend about one of his works of art.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, he said the friend told him, had posted a work he had painted five years ago to its official social media channels without his knowledge.

The painting, which looks like a scene from the Oregon Trail, depicts a young white couple — she in a long dress, he in a cowboy hat — cradling a baby in a covered wagon, with mountains and another wagon in the background.

“Remember your Homeland’s Heritage,” the Department of Homeland Security captioned the July 14 post on X, Instagram and Facebook.

Exactly whose homeland and whose heritage? And what was the intended message of the federal department, whose masked and heavily armed agents have arrested thousands of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking immigrants — most with no criminal convictions — in California this summer?

That has been the source of heated online debate at a time when the Trump administration has ramped up its online trolling with memes and jokes about the raids that critics have called racist, childish and unbefitting official government social media accounts.

The “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” post racked up 19 million views on X and thousands of responses. Critics compared the post to Nazi propaganda. Supporters said it was “OK to be white” and to celebrate “traditional values.”

Among the responses: “You mean the heritage built on stolen land, Indigenous genocide, and whitewashed history? You don’t get to romanticize settlers while caging today’s migrants.”

And: “A few minutes later, an ICE wagon pulls up next to them, agents cuff and stuff them into the back and then summarily send them back to Ireland.”

Another person, referencing the “Oregon Trail” video game, joked: “All three died from dysentery.”

Asked about criticism of the post, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an email to The Times: “If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails, forded the rivers, and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook. This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage. Get used to it.”

On July 11, a federal judge temporarily halted indiscriminate immigration sweeps in Southern California at places such as Home Depot, car washes and rows of street vendors. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said she found sufficient evidence that agents were unlawfully using race, ethnicity, language, accent, location or employment as a pretext for immigration enforcement.

The next week, the Department of Homeland Security — which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement along with Customs and Border Protection — posted the white-people-in-the-covered-wagon painting. It also posted a meme with a fake poster from the 1982 movie “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial” with the caption: “Illegal aliens, take a page from E.T. and PHONE HOME.”

Ramesh Srinivasan, founder of the University of California Digital Cultures Lab, which studies the connections between technology, politics and culture, said the mean-spirited posts and gleeful deportation jokes are part of a deliberate trolling campaign by the Trump administration.

“The saddest part of all of this is it mirrors how DHS is acting in real life,” he said.

“Someone can be a troll online but may not be as much [of one] in real life,” he said. “The digital world and physical world may not be completely in lockstep with each other. But in this particular case, there’s a level of honesty that’s actually disturbing.”

Srinivasan, who is Indian American, said that although the covered wagon painting is not offensive in and of itself, the timing of the Homeland Security post raises questions about the government’s intended meaning.

The painting, he said, “is being used to show inclusion and exclusion, who’s worthy of being an American and who isn’t.”

Srinivasan said mean memes are effective because they spread quickly in a media environment in which people are flooded with information and quickly scroll through visual content and short video reels with little context.

“There are hidden algorithms that determine visibility and virality,” Srinivasan said. “Outrage goes more viral because it generates what tech companies call engagement.”

Here in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken a page from Trump’s troll playbook, with recent social media posts that include name-calling, swear words, and, of course, memes.

Earlier this month, Newsom responded to a post on X by the far-right Libs of TikTok account that showed video of someone apparently firing a gun at immigration officers in Camarillo. The account asked if the governor would condemn the shooting. Newsom wrote: “Of course I condemn any assault on law enforcement, you shit poster. Now do Jan 6.”

In a post on X, Newsom’s press office called White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of many of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, a “fascist cuck.” Newsom defended the name-calling in a news conference, saying of the Trump administration: “I don’t think they understand any other kind of language.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller talks to reporters outside the White House on May 9. Miller is the architect of many of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

The term is used in far right circles to insult liberals as weak. It is also short for “cuckold,” the husband of an unfaithful wife.

Even for Team Trump, which is adept at distraction, the heightened online efforts to own the libs, as supporters say, come at a precarious time for the president. He has been embroiled in controversies over rumors about his friendship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the effects of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which will cut Medicaid and food assistance programs while funding the planned hiring of thousands of new immigration agents.

Still, his meme teams are working hard to stoke outrage and brag about immigration raids.

Earlier this month, Homeland Security posted a slickly edited video on its social media accounts showing border agents at work, with a narrator quoting the Bible verse Isaiah 6:8: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’”

The video uses a cover of the song, “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by the San Francisco rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

An man protesting immigration raids walks in front of California National Guard troops, federalized by President Trump, as they guard a federal building in downtown Los Angeles on June 12.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

On Instagram, the band wrote: “It has come to our attention that the Department of Homeland Security is improperly using our recording of ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’ in your latest propaganda video. It’s obvious that you don’t respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution.”

On July 10, the band asked the government to cease and desist the use of its recording and pull down the video.

It added, “Oh, and go f— yourselves.”

As of Friday evening, the video remained posted on X along with the song.

In recent days, White House and Homeland Security social media accounts have shared memes that include: A coffee mug with the words “Fire up the deportation planes;” a weightlifting skeleton declaring, “My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations;” and alligators wearing ICE caps in reference to the officially named Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention facility in Florida.

A meme shared last week depicted a poster outside the White House that read: “oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHiS?” The caption: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.”

The White House also shared the Homeland Security covered wagon post.

In response to questions about online criticism that calls the posts racist, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson asked a Times reporter in an email to “explain how deporting illegal aliens is racist.”

She also said in a statement: “We won’t stop celebrating the Trump Administration’s many wins via banger memes on social media. Stay mad.”

Weistling, the artist unwittingly caught up in the controversy, apparently was surprised not only by the posting of his painting and his name, but also by the Department of Homeland Security using an incorrect title for the artwork.

The government labeled the painting: “New Life in a New Land — Morgan Weistling.”

The actual title of the painting is “A Prayer for a New Life.” Prints are listed for sale on the website for the evangelical nonprofit Focus on the Family.

Weistling, a registered Republican who lives in Los Angeles County, could not be reached for comment.

Shortly after the government used his painting, he wrote on his website: “Attention! I did not give the DHS permission to use my painting in their recent postings on their official web platforms. They used a painting I did 5 years ago and re-titled it and posted it without my permission. It is a violation of my copyright on the painting. It was a surprise to me and I am trying to gather how this happen [sic] and what to do next.”

He later shortened the statement on his website and deleted posts on his Instagram and Facebook accounts saying he learned about the post while on vacation and was stunned the government “thought they could randomly post an artist’s painting without permission” and re-title it.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions from The Times about copyright issues.

But a spokesman said the posting of an incorrect title was “an honest mistake.”