WASHINGTON, D.C. — Two senior Democratic lawmakers, including Indian American Representative Pramila Jayapal, are urging Meta and Google to end their digital advertising partnerships with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, alleging that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used the companies’ platforms to run recruitment and “self-deportation” ads that draw on white nationalist imagery and rhetoric.
Representatives Becca Balint, the vice ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Jayapal, the ranking member of the House subcommittee overseeing immigration enforcement, sent separate letters to the chief executives of Meta and Google seeking detailed information about the scope of their agreements with DHS and calling for an end to the advertising campaigns.
The lawmakers said the ads are part of a broader effort to rapidly expand ICE recruitment, including surging officers to cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and New Orleans, while lowering hiring standards to meet congressional staffing mandates.
In their letters, Balint and Jayapal warned that ICE has increasingly relied on paid digital advertising on major platforms to recruit thousands of new agents, alleging that some of the content has been tied to white nationalist themes.
The letter to Google said DHS has partnered with the company “as part of a large-scale campaign that uses white nationalist inspired propaganda to recruit immigration enforcement agents,” and urged Google to “cease further enabling this conduct.”
The lawmakers cited reports indicating that DHS spent more than $1 million on “self-deportation” advertisements in the last 90 days and about $3 million on Spanish-language ads on Google and YouTube promoting the same message. They said ICE spent a total of $5.8 million on advertising with Meta and Google last year.
Balint and Jayapal pointed to a recent DHS recruitment ad posted on Instagram that stated, “we’ll have our home again,” a phrase they said is drawn from a song popularized in neo-Nazi spaces and commonly used in white nationalist calls for a race war. They said similar slogans and imagery have historically been associated with neo-Nazi groups.
In their letter to Meta, the lawmakers cited reporting that DHS spent more than $1 million on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in “Latin music,” “Spanish as a second language,” and “Mexican cuisine,” along with millions more on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram. Since August alone, they wrote, DHS paid Meta an additional $500,000 for recruitment advertising.
The lawmakers argued that the advertising push coincides with ICE lowering hiring standards, including waiving age limits for law enforcement applicants, offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000, and deploying new recruits without sufficient vetting or training.
“The impact of an unqualified army of ICE agents being unleashed across the country has been severe,” Balint and Jayapal wrote, citing deaths, warrantless arrests, mass raids, and a record number of deaths in ICE custody.
The letters also questioned how the advertisements were approved under Meta’s and Google’s stated policies on hate speech and discriminatory content. The lawmakers asked both companies to disclose the duration and terms of their agreements with DHS, whether the ads comply with internal advertising standards, and whether the companies communicated with DHS about the content of the campaigns. (Source: IANS)
