The Department of Homeland Security is facing criticism for using Woody Guthrie’s famous 1940 folk song “This Land Is Your Land” in a promotional video.
The song appears in a July 30 clip from the agency on X, soundtracking a video featuring scenes of natural beauty, families, and federal agents, plus the caption, “The Promise of America is worth Protecting. The Future of our Homeland is worth Defending.”
Experts on Guthrie say the singer — a lifelong socialist who wrote songs about topics like immigrant farmworkers and decorated his guitar with the slogan, ‘This machine kills fascists’ — was not intending to write an anthem for an agency carrying out mass deportations.
Instead, Guthrie biographer Will Kaufman told CNN, the song reflects Guthrie’s preoccupation with the inequality, poverty, and violence that took place during the 1930s in America in the wake of the Depression.
“Woody is writing about a different America,” he said. “He’s writing about cops and vigilantes and barbed wire and bread lines.”
“Boy, did the DHS ever get it wrong!” the Guthrie family added in an email to the outlet. “So now, it looks like we’ll all have to sing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ right back at ‘em, so they can re-learn it and get it right.”
Though the song has gone on to be considered a generic pro-U.S.A. anthem, it was originally written in part out of Guthrie’s annoyance with another patriotic tune, “God Bless America.”
The original versions of “This Land Is Your Land” also feature lesser-remembered verses about people who “stood hungry,” as well as a line that called out a sign bearing the words “private property” or “no trespassing,” depending on which iteration was being sung.
Later in life, Guthrie wrote a song calling out Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, for “racial hate,” over the real estate developer’s alleged history of racial discrimination towards potential tenants.
The concern over DHS’s use of Guthrie’s music mirrors the response from artists and their families who have seen their paintings used in DHS social media efforts.
As The Independent has reported, the agency has used nostalgic images of the Western frontier and small-town, midcentury America in between touting its military-style immigration raids, a combination one observer said was “classic fascist propaganda.”
The agency has also faced backlash for using memes like the Jet2 Holiday sound and AI-images to promote its deportation campaign.
Immigration officials, who got an infusion of some $170 billion in funding from Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill spending package, are in the midst of a recruiting blitz and have sought to blanket social media in ads to reach Gen Z, while eliminating age limits for applicants.
