The Department of Homeland Security is accused of sharing thinly-veiled nativist propaganda on social media through art as it pursues a sweeping campaign of mass deportations.
Throughout July, the X account of the department run by Kristi Noem posted a steady stream of paintings exemplifying a very particular version of the “homeland.”
That has included posting the 1872 work American Progress by John Gast, in which an ethereal Lady Liberty floats above the Western landscape, as white settlers advance across the frame with stage coaches and rail lines, while Native Americans and buffalo run to the margins.
Another X post features the contemporary painting A Prayer for a New Life, by Morgan Weistling, a close-up of a white pioneer couple clutching a baby in the back of a covered wagon, along with the caption, “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.”
A third such post includes Morning Pledge, a nostalgic mid-20th century scene of kids in a small town walking towards an American flag, as painted by Thomas Kinkade.
The creators and guardians of these works have expressed outrage over being drafted into DHS publicity — and history and politics experts have also raised concerns over this art being used as “propaganda”.
Weistling said he wasn’t consulted prior to the Trump administration using his work. The Kinkade Family Foundation, meanwhile, said Morning Pledge was also being used without permission, perverted to “promote division and xenophobia associated with the ideals of DHS.”
The foundation told The Independent that Kinkade, who died in 2012, struggled in life with poverty as a child and substance abuse as an adult. He viewed his paintings, known for their soft, glowing light, as a way to “imagine a different kind of world, where warmth, safety, and belonging are human rights for all.” Beyond the canvas, Kinkade helped raise millions for the poor, while his foundation has handed out thousands of therapeutic art kits, including in farmworker communities.
“That vision wasn’t meant for a select few, but for everyone,” the foundation said in an email. “Throughout his life, Thomas sought to respond to moments of hardship with compassion and solidarity, standing with communities made vulnerable.T o see his work used in ways that promote exclusion and division betrays the very heart of what he stood for.”
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that the agency “honors artwork that celebrates America’s heritage and history, and we are pleased that the media is highlighting our efforts to showcase these patriotic pieces.”
“If the media needs a history lesson on the brave men and women who blazed the trails and forged this Republic from the sweat of their brow, we are happy to send them a history textbook,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the statement. “This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage.”
According to Richard White, a distinguished historian of the West and professor emeritus at Stanford University, DHS’s use of works like American Progress is as ironic as it is revealing.
The painting depicted a highly nostalgic, mythologized version of the country even at the moment it was created. In reality, instead of the peaceful scene, violence was everywhere, with the U.S. Army (not pictured in the painting) involved in violent, dispossessing wars with indigenous tribes across the West, and groups like the KKK carrying out racist terror campaigns against newly emancipated Black people after the U.S. Civil War.
“It’s not about history,” White said of American Progress, but rather a “mythic narrative” of America.
“The original picture erased the reality around it.”
White suspects the Trump administration is using the painting now for a similar purpose. The historian lives in Los Angeles, where masked federal immigration agents and military troops spent weeks conducting dragnet immigration operations, an effort he compares to the Nazi regime’s Gestapo secret police.
“The real problem is what’s actually happening on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities,” he said.
Journalist Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, sees similar far-right currents in DHS’s images, strains of nativism he argues have existed just below the surface at the department since its founding in 2002 after the 9/11 terror attacks.
“It was definitely a crypto-right wing move from the start after 9/11 to use a word like ‘homeland’ in particular in the context of security,” he told The Independent.
Prior to this point, he said, the term “homeland” was not in mainstream use in this way in the U.S. It had the ring of European-style nationalism (and worse) back then, a poor fit for a pluralist democracy in which most of the population, at some point in history, came from somewhere else.
Trump’s DHS, however, has taken this implicit ideology to the explicit extreme, Ackerman argued, using the tools of “far-right internet culture” to provoke people by using jarring memes plus the “classic fascist propaganda” of armed agents kicking in doors to arrest mostly non-white people.
“This is a turn. This is different,” he said. “This is very racialized, very essentialized propaganda that DHS did not previously explicitly traffic in, even if this probably reflects the id of the Department of Homeland Security that whole time.”
The administration’s immigration PR efforts have extended beyond the DHS X account and its selection of pioneer paintings.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has earned the derisive nickname “ICE Barbie” from critics for her frequent photo-ops in cowboy oufits and combat-ready gear matching with the various agencies under her purview.
Both Trump and Noem have featured in wartime-style recruiting posters urging viewers to “Defend the Homeland, Join ICE Today,” as the administration offers $50,000 sign-on bonuses for new ICE officers.
Trump has long leaned into a nostalgic aesthetic as a notable part of his politics.
One of his final executive orders in 2020 involved a demand that all new federal buildings in Washington be built in the “beautiful” neo-classical style, with marble and columns meant to evoke the temples of ancient Greece and Rome, while his signature political slogan, “Make America Great Again,” includes an unmistakable nod to a heroic past.
Government officials have long trafficked in tropes and propaganda about disfavored groups, too, White said, pointing to the virulently racist popular depictions of the Japanese during WWII. What stands out in this present era, however, is the seeming commitment of whole government departments to producing such images.
In time, however, White said even these purposely exclusionary images of national propaganda reveal their limitations.
“In myth, nothing ever changes,” he said. “In history, things do change.”
