The official White House website has launched a new page titled, “Aliens,” that looks like a video game, with stars twinkling in a dark sky behind spooky neon green text that reads, “THEY WALK AMONG US.” The design of the website is made to draw attention, and it will: nothing generates interest like space invaders, and fear has unique power to drive human behavior.
“We’re releasing a lot of information having to do with extraterrestrial things,” President Donald Trump said in a Cabinet meeting on May 28, the day the new site went live. “And people are totally fascinated by it … it’s literally trending number one.” Earlier in the month, the Pentagon began releasing files on U.F.O.s at the site, war.gov/UFO. But the aliens on the new official White House website aren’t extraterrestrial, despite the space theme. They are people: foreign nationals or those mistakenly assumed to be. And the timing of the president’s comments and the new site appear to be a bait and switch, luring in the public with the promise of extraterrestrials only to deliver law enforcement propaganda. Regardless of the kitschy premise, the site is neither a game nor a joke.
Echoing white supremacist rhetoric and the great replacement theory, which claims nonwhite foreigners are displacing and destroying white majorities, the site refers to dangerous invaders who arrived in the United States “under the cover of darkness” and infiltrated American society thanks to a conspiracy by “presidents, congressmen, and senior officials.” In 1950s typeface, and under a fake “declassification” label, the site says these “aliens” have “embedded themselves directly into our society.” Only one man, it declares, had the courage to reveal the secret, and now only he has the solution.
“President Trump told the truth. The cover-up is over. Secure the border. Deport them all.”
Contrary to the White House’s claim, it’s no secret that millions of undocumented people—“aliens” in the old English lexicon of U.S. legalese— live in the United States. It’s equally obvious that the White House aims to round up millions and expel them, since Trump and his advisers have long proclaimed that as a top priority. During his 2024 campaign, Trump promised “the largest deportation program in American history.” The people he is targeting, he relentlessly and falsely demonizes, calling them “vicious, violent criminals” and “stone-cold killers” who will “walk into your kitchen and cut your throat” and “not even think about it the next morning.”
Mass expulsion would transform the United States as profoundly as anything else Trump is attempting in his second term, and he can’t do it at the scale he wants without the public backing he famously craves. The new website is brazen propaganda to get Americans to hate their neighbors and to support purging millions of people from the country. Under the cover of amusement, the site systematically works to construct migrants as an existential threat, to dehumanize them, to stifle empathy for them, and finally, it asks people to report “suspicious aliens,” thus becoming complicit in the government’s effort to dispense with them.
Constructing the Threat
Whitehouse.gov/aliens pushes inflammatory buttons familiar to experts on rhetoric that increases the risk of intergroup atrocities by instilling deep fear of members of another group. Such rhetoric, that one of us has named “dangerous speech” for its capacity to inspire violence, can demonize any human group. Dangerous speech is similar across languages, cultures, and history. Since no human has been born hating another group of people, dangerous speech is a vital tool for cultivating the collective fear necessary for people to support attacking or removing another group— in this case with arrests, imprisonment, and expulsion.
“ALIENS” (capitalized in Trumpian style) pose a “real danger,” the site claims, to “every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.” Against the starry black sky of the new site, foreign nationals are depicted as dangerous not only with words but also with a heat map of immigration arrests that have taken place all over the country, from Blacklick, Ohio to Henderson, Nevada, along with long text blocks of crimes, many of them violent. The impression this creates is false, which is typical when tyrants use dangerous speech to accrue power. In fact, noncitizens commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens, and most of the people Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested have never been convicted of any U.S. crime, as the Cato Institute reported last year. Since then, the share of noncriminals in ICE detention has only risen, to more than 70 percent as of April, and only a tiny proportion of those detained are the violent criminals ICE claims it is chasing.
Moreover, quite a few of the invading “Aliens” seem to be U.S. citizens, including some people born on U.S. soil, according to the White House site. The United States is even on the site’s list of native countries of people arrested by ICE. And WIRED reported that according to the site’s heat map of arrests, ICE has grabbed at least one U.S.-born person in 715 of the listed American cities and towns. In 83 of the locations identified, every single person ICE arrested was a U.S. citizen.
Stamping out Empathy
The Aliens website makes two other moves familiar to scholars of mass atrocities: dehumanizing members of a group (here, conflating them with extraterrestrials and referring to them as “it”) and quashing public compassion for them.
”If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed,” the site exhorts in glowing green. “The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it … and return it safely to its place of origin.”
In reality, ICE officers have broken down doors to drag people into subfreezing streets in their underwear, and deported them to foreign sites of torture. More than 60,000 people who are now in ICE detention on any given day often lack adequate medical care, and many of them do not get returned safely to their countries of origin. Protests against these actions, especially in Minneapolis where ICE officers shot U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renée Good to death (leading to more protests), have irked the White House.
Compassion has been a nuisance in other State campaigns to purge large groups of people. In 1941, for example, Nazi Governor-General Hans Frank, outlining a program to annihilate Jews, complained of public sympathy for them:
I know that there is criticism of many of the measures now applied to the Jews in the Reich. There are always deliberate attempts to speak again and again of cruelty, harshness … [A]gree with me on a formula: we will have pity, on principle, only for the German people, and for nobody else in the world.
Eliminating a large group within a society requires the complicity of a critical mass of the public. During Stalin’s Purge beginning in 1937, millions of people were denounced by others as “enemies of the people” and then arrested, often tortured, and killed. In East Germany, the Stasi secret police recruited nearly 200,000 Inoffizielle Mitarbeiteror (“informal collaborators”) or IMs who informed on their friends, neighbors, and families. In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo relied heavily on informers to help root out Jews and people who tried to protect them or merely opposed the Nazi regime. In the 1994 Rwanda genocide, political leaders instigated a mass mobilization of Hutus against their Tutsi neighbors. The same pattern can be found in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, and beyond.
A big red button on the White House’s “Aliens” website invites the public to take part in Trump’s mass deportation plan by becoming an informer. Clicking on “REPORT SUSPICIOUS ALIENS” leads to an ICE tip line, providing a pathway to action for potentially millions of people who might not have been looking for a way to engage with ICE.
One Savior
The website also strives to convince viewers that deliverance from the purported existential threat of an “Alien invasion” runs through one, and only one man: “President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose.” He is “Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid.”
Trump has repeatedly pressed the idea of an alien (migrant) invasion—so much that on the first day of his second term he signed an Executive Order titled, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” and offered himself as the only protection, the only person who could repel it. It is typical of authoritarians to introduce a terrifying threat, and then offer themselves as the only savior.
Actually delivering on mass deportation, however, is an immense political, financial, and logistical challenge. Legislation that Trump called his “Bill Beautiful Bill” provided $170 billion over a four-year period for immigration enforcement, enabling a mass recruitment campaign of new ICE officers to conduct immigration arrests, alongside a 400 percent increase in the organization’s detention budget. This infrastructure of mass deportation is essential context for understanding why whitehouse.gov/aliens is not “cheeky” or “tongue-in-cheek” as some media outlets have described it. With its conspiratorial flavor and meme-ification style, it is a cleverly crafted piece of propaganda to instill and increase American fear so that the Trump administration can catapult the country back to an imagined, demographically homogenous past.
