In a two-minute, 47-second video posted on the White House social media account, U.S. Marines in V-22 Ospreys land at the southern border in clouds of dust, then gather up their M4 rifles as the sun streams over President Trump’s partly finished border wall.
The goal of the video, which has the hallmarks of an action movie trailer, is unmistakable: to make sure Americans see, often in visceral ways, that Mr. Trump is making good on his pledge to seal the border and deport people he calls “illegal aliens.”
The footage is part of an expansive public relations effort, coordinated by senior White House officials, to produce and distribute videos, photographs and other imagery showing predawn ICE raids, mug shots of migrants and deportation flights on military planes.
And while federal agencies regularly distribute news releases about their work, accompanied by photos or videos produced in-house, the campaign by the Trump White House is remarkable for its unwavering focus on immigration, the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns and the issue at the heart of his political identity.
Few efforts like this have been so directly coordinated inside the West Wing, according to people involved in border enforcement for the past several decades.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies were providing material for the effort.
“We are receiving real-time updates from the agencies at D.H.S. on the illegal migrants that the Trump administration is arresting, detaining and deporting,” Ms. Leavitt said. “It’s a whole-of-government approach to telling the story of these deportations.”
In several threads on X over the past week, the White House has posted pictures of men identified as having been “ARRESTED” by immigration officials after being charged or convicted of crimes like rape, murder and kidnapping. The photos of the men, along with their names, were formatted to look like wanted posters from the Old West, with the official White House logo at the bottom.
By displaying the pictures of the men, top White House officials were demonstrating what they say is a determination to follow the nation’s immigration laws. But they were also engaging in an exercise of naming and shaming immigrants who in some cases had yet to be convicted.
Celebrities like Dr. Phil McGraw, who embedded with immigration agents during a sweep in Chicago this week, have joined in the public relations efforts. Social media sites like X, owned by Mr. Trump’s adviser Elon Musk, have become tools of the government PR campaign.
Left out of the public relations effort are details about the roundups. Immigration officials have said that 7,400 people were arrested in the first nine days of Mr. Trump’s second term. But they have released few details about who those people are, what they had been charged with or where they are being deported to — making it difficult to determine whether the pace of arrests is higher than in previous administrations.
John Sandweg, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama, said that administration would often send news releases highlighting that the agency had arrested certain people with criminal records. During the Biden administration, homeland security officials made efforts to advertise the deportation flights of families.
“This goes way beyond it,” Mr. Sandweg said of the volume of messaging by the Trump administration during the past 10 days. “It wasn’t on that level — the sheer amount of attention.”
“It is stunning to me,” he said.
It is hardly surprising, though, that Mr. Trump and his aides have embraced an aggressive approach to public messaging. Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser and the longtime architect of his assault on the immigration system, has repeatedly expressed frustration that the government was not doing more to publicize its determination to keep immigrants out.
In 2020, during the first Trump administration, ICE put up “Wanted by ICE” billboards in Pennsylvania, a crucial swing state, showing the faces of immigrants who had been released from a nearby jail that refused to work with the agency. The move drew condemnation at the time, but Trump administration officials saw it as a way to highlight the lack of help from so-called sanctuary jurisdictions.
New members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle have also signed on to the aggressive public relations approach. On Tuesday morning, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, posted a video of herself dressed in tactical gear while participating in a raid in New York City.
“7 AM in NYC,” she wrote above the video. “Getting the dirt bags off the streets.”
A centerpiece of the public relations effort has been the White House’s decision to feature the military’s role in the crackdown.
On Mr. Trump’s first day in office, he assigned the United States Northern Command to “seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration.” He also ordered the deployment of “sufficient personnel along the southern border of the United States to ensure complete operational control.”
Within days, more than 500 troops were en route to the border with Mexico, their arrival captured by D.H.S. and Defense Department photographers and videographers. Not long after, Air Force C-17s were in the air, deporting shackled migrants, who were depicted in government videos like prisoners in a chain gang. The first military flight took off on Jan. 23 from Tucson International Airport in Arizona, headed for Guatemala.
White House officials said they were pleased that the Defense Department has cooperated fully in providing the administration with video content documenting the border deployment and the deportation flights. (According to the Defense Department, its videos are produced by career military public affairs officers, some of who also have experience filming for news organizations.)
“The White House communications team is in constant contact” with the Pentagon, Ms. Leavitt said this week.
It remains unclear what the Marines will be doing at the border as part of the deployment given the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which puts limits on the activities of the military on U.S. soil. Mr. Trump and his aides have talked about invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to allow the military greater freedom to act, but so far they have not done so.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, active-duty military members largely played a supporting role at the border, not directly confronting migrants attempting to cross the border. Critics of the president said this week that the current effort seems more like a photo op than a serious way to increase security at the border.
One Marine officer, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the primary role for the military in the early days of its time at the border is to weld concertina wire into engineering stakes that could then be attached to the border wall, in the hopes of providing some additional deterrence.
Corey Price, the former head of the officers who handle deportations at ICE, said the videos and media were clearly intended to send a message.
“My thoughts are that they are highlighting ICE and their important mission to ensure the public knows what they are doing and also get ahead of any accusations that ultimately get made against ICE during their enforcement operations,” Mr. Price said.
The message appears to have been received, at least in some online communities.
In response to the Trump administration’s public relations push, Selena Gomez, the singer and actress with 65.5 million followers on the social media site X, posted a 30-second clip of herself sobbing about the treatment of what she called “my people” at the hands of government immigration agents.
The backlash to her video from Mr. Trump’s supporters was swift, accusing her of having not expressed the same level of concern for the victims of murders or rapes committed by illegal immigrants who had been convicted of the crimes. Within hours, she had taken down her video.
And the administration’s efforts to publicize its efforts have continued. Wednesday evening, Mr. Miller reposted video of Border Patrol agents marching a line of handcuffed immigrants back into Mexico across the Hidalgo bridge from McAllen, Texas.
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