A painting depicting an angelic Lady Columbia wearing the Star of Empire on her head, protecting white settlers racing westward in 19th-century America as Native American Indians flee in fear. The message accompanying it: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
In another, a white woman inside a covered wagon on the frontier has just given birth with the help of her husband. Its caption: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.”
Then there are the posters. Donald Trump giving a military salute, with bold capital letters overlaid: “DEFEND THE HOMELAND – JOIN ICE TODAY.” In another bearing the same message, Kristi Noem, head of “Homeland Security” (itself a fascist term from the second Bush administration), is outfitted in a bulletproof vest and military cap, sitting behind the wheel of an ICE van.
Only recently, if someone told us that such reactionary and fascist-style art would be used to recruit masked secret police that roam, unidentified, through U.S. streets, kidnapping people and shipping them off to prisons and concentration camps without any due process, we would have declared them crazy.
Now, the most mainstream of lawmakers and politicians are using the term “fascism” to describe what we are dealing with.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently publicly compared ICE to the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz said during a May 2025 speech at the University of Minnesota Law School’s commencement ceremony.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks… [people are] being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,” Walz said.
Trump, among numerous other fascistic moves, has drastically increased the number of nationwide arrests of immigrants since he returned to office in January. ICE’s arrests of immigrants have gone up by more than 100% across the country, often with little attention paid to the actual legal status of those kidnapped from the streets.
Other Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Dan Goldman of New York and Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, have also compared ICE to Hitler’s political and racial police. These two members of Congress were both recently blocked from inspecting an ICE facility, which the law entitles them to do. 
The new ICE recruitment program comes amidst increasing criticism of Trump’s mass deportation terror program.
A signing bonus of up to $50,000 is being offered to new recruits. The solicitations are being used to entice law enforcement officers in cities to quit their jobs and sign up instead as ICE agents. Student loan forgiveness is another prize dangled in front of potential recruits by the same administration that fought tooth-and-nail to kill such relief for U.S. students in general.
Use of art to promote fascistic ideas is not unique to ICE. Posters featuring close facial shots of classical sculpture, including the David, have been appearing on college campuses. They are accompanied by printed slogans such as “Serve Your People” and “Protect Your Heritage.”
Nazi “art” in Germany often featured classical figures, individuals, and buildings. Hitler’s plans for the future capital of the “New Germania,” encompassing the entire world, involved buildings in the classical Greek style.
The name “Identity Evropa” appears on some of the fascist posters plastered around campuses in recent years. Identity Evropa is the name of a fascist, white supremacist organization identified as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
ICE is using similar imagery, artwork, and slogans to put forward the idea that the country is facing a great threat from “the other.” Nazi Germany similarly used its propaganda to scare people about such alleged threats from “the other,” whether they were Communists, Jews, or anyone else.
The Nazi parallels go even further, though, according to some observers. The painting showing the genocidal expansion westward that the Department of Homeland Security used is from 1872. The caption DHS added, along with the work’s title and painter—“A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending. – American Progress, John Gast”—grabbed the attention of some right-wing watchers.
The caption had exactly 14 words, which prompted Northern University Law Professor Evan Bernick to draw a comparison to the infamous white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” He also pointed to the fact that the “H” in both Heritage and Homeland were intentionally capitalized. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet; another neo-Nazi code is 88, or HH, for “Heil Hitler.”
Similarly, the pioneer wagon train birth painting, “New Life in a New Land,” also featured a caption that capitalized the words “Homeland” and “Heritage,” with no valid grammatical reason.
Is it all just paranoia and conspiracy thinking? White supremacists and American neo-Nazis have long relied on frontier imagery and glorification of the genocide of the indigenous peoples of North America as part of their propaganda efforts. So, Bernick’s analysis might not be far off.
With the Department of Homeland Security’s publicity materials, patriotism, racism, and violence all get blended together. Uncle Sam, for instance, is recast as a stormtrooper vigilante in some of DHS’ media, encouraging Americans to “help your country and yourself” by calling in to “report all foreign invaders.”
Descriptions of immigrants as criminals, predators, and invaders to justify deportation efforts also allow the administration to divide and conquer the many groups hurt by its anti-democratic and right-wing economic policies. The Nazis in Germany and fascists elsewhere have always described their opponents and victims in such terms in order to stoke division.
Rep. James Clyburn of Georgia, speaking on MSNBC this week, delivered a profound warning of where the country is heading. He declared: “If we don’t stop this and turn this around very soon, we will end up exactly like Germany did in the 1930s.”
Judging by the recruitment posters and propaganda put out to promote ICE, that seems to be exactly what Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have in mind.
C.J. Atkins contributed to this story.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author(s).
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