Washington, Jan 23 (IANS) Two senior Democratic lawmakers, including Indian American Pramila Jayapal, have pressed Meta and Google to end their digital advertising partnerships with the US Department of Homeland Security, alleging that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used the companies’ platforms to run recruitment and “self-deportation” advertisements drawing on white nationalist imagery and rhetoric.
US Representatives Becca Balint, the vice ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Pramila Jayapal, the ranking member of the House subcommittee overseeing immigration enforcement, sent separate letters to the chief executives of Meta and Google seeking detailed answers about the scope of the companies’ agreements with DHS and demanding commitments to halt the ads.
The lawmakers said the campaigns are part of a broader effort to rapidly expand ICE recruitment, including surging officers to cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and New Orleans, while lowering hiring standards to meet congressional mandates.
In their letters, Balint and Jayapal warned that ICE has turned to paid digital advertising on major platforms as it seeks to hire thousands of additional agents, arguing that the agency has relied on content tied to white nationalist themes to attract recruits.
The letter to Google said DHS has partnered with the company “as part of a large-scale campaign that uses white nationalist inspired propaganda to recruit immigration enforcement agents,” and urged Google to “cease further enabling this conduct.”
It cited reports that DHS spent more than $1 million on “self-deportation” ads in the last 90 days and about $3 million on Spanish-language ads on Google and YouTube promoting the same strategy. According to lawmakers, ICE spent a total of $5.8 million on ads with Meta and Google last year.
The lawmakers pointed to a recent example in which DHS posted a recruitment ad on Instagram stating “we’ll have our home again,” a phrase they said is drawn from a song popularised in neo-Nazi spaces and used in white nationalist calls for a race war. They said similar slogans and images have historically been associated with neo-Nazi groups.
In the letter to Meta, Balint and Jayapal cited reporting showing that DHS spent more than $1 million on “self-deportation” ads targeted at people interested in “Latin music,” “Spanish as a second language,” and “Mexican cuisine,” and that the agency paid millions more to run recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram. Since August alone, they wrote, DHS paid Meta an additional $500,000 for recruitment advertising.
The lawmakers argued that the recruitment push coincides with ICE lowering hiring standards, including waiving age limits for law-enforcement applicants, offering signing bonuses as high as $50,000, and sending new recruits into the field without adequate vetting or training.
“The impact of an unqualified army of ICE agents being unleashed across the country has been severe,” Balint and Jayapal wrote, citing deaths, warrantless arrests, mass raids, and a record number of deaths in ICE custody.
The letters also questioned how the advertisements were allowed to run on Meta’s and Google’s platforms, given the companies’ stated policies on hate speech and discriminatory content. The lawmakers asked both companies to disclose the extent and duration of their agreements with DHS, whether the ads comply with their internal advertising standards, and whether they communicated with DHS about the content of the campaigns.
–IANS
lkj/rs