Trump Turns Migrants Into Memes to Promote Deportation Agenda

As President Trump pursues his hardline immigration policies, the White House has sought to punctuate public messaging for the crackdown through memes and designed-to-go-viral content.

Why it matters: The memes mirror President Trump’s combative posture, adopting the boundary pushing, extremely online humor of the MAGA base while reveling in the outrage they generate from opponents.

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The latest: The latest White House memes came Thursday when the administration posted an AI-generated cartoon on X of an undocumented immigrant being arrested by ICE.

• The meme, showing a woman crying while being handcuffed by a stern-looking immigration official, was made in the vein of ChatGPT-produced Studio Ghibli-style portraits that have recently taken the internet by storm.

State of play: While Trump often painted an apocalyptic vision of criminal immigrants on the campaign trail, other immigration-related memes posted by the administration adopt a mocking tone.

• In response to a Homeland Security X post earlier this month about the deportation of Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, the White House posted a photo of Trump waving sanguinely out of the window of a McDonald’s drive-thru.
• For Valentine’s Day, the White House posted a meme of Trump and border czar Tom Homan’s heads floating on a pink, heart-themed background.
• “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you,” the meme read.

Between the lines: Trump’s affinity for memes reflects the MAGA movement’s origins in some of the “darker corners of the internet” — like 4chan — “where meme culture is … quite prevalent,” Jacob Neiheisel, an associate professor of political science at the University of Buffalo, told Axios.

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