ICE Quotes the Bible in a New Propaganda Video

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security shared a propaganda video on the social media site X.

The one-minute video opens with footage of helicopters taking off, and a man with a thick Southern accent says, “Here’s a Bible verse I think about sometimes. Many times.” As people in military fatigues don masks and ready weapons inside the helicopter, the man quotes Isaiah 6:8: “I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’”

 As the helicopter takes off, a sonorous cover of Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” plays before the man finishes the verse: “I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’” A cut to a close-up of an arm patch that reads “U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” The final half of the video cycles through shots of ICE agents patrolling a river, flying over the border wall, and looking through night vision while singers chant, “Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down.”

In other words, the video rips Isaiah’s call narrative (6:1-13) out of its original context to baptize ICE’s war on non-white Americans.

Here am I, send me. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/mRvL6VmGqt

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) July 7, 2025

 In his book How Fascism Works, philosopher Jason Stanley explains: “Political propaganda uses the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends.” This DHS video illustrates Stanley’s definition of propaganda perfectly: The U.S. government has appropriated the words of the Judean prophet Isaiah and the latter-day U.S. prophet Johnny Cash to baptize their wholly unbiblical treatment of undocumented people (and, too often, documented people as well).

READ MORE: What Advocates Want Churches to Know About Defending Migrants

Over the last several months, ICE has conducted raids across the country, often by plainclothes officers wearing masks and driving unmarked vehicles. They have conducted raids on church property, farms, factories, and other workplaces. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4, allocates over $100 billion to ICE over the next four years, more than triple their existing budget.

ICE’s actions have been met with nationwide protests and international outrage, which makes the aim of this video clear: The Trump administration seeks to consolidate support for their inhumane and evil treatment of people by casting themselves as virtuous biblical heroes.

By deploying God’s call to Isaiah, the video casts those working for ICE as the ones answering God’s call, servants who do what few others have the courage or conviction to do. And the video’s imagery leaves no question that it sees God’s call as aligned with Trump’s draconian vision of a white America.

But ethnic nationalism was not the message God called Isaiah to deliver. As the Bible makes clear, God’s message delivered through Isaiah was one of impending judgment, precisely because the people of Judah ignored God’s calls for justice and instead were continuing to oppress people who were poor, widowed, orphaned, and refugees. In his 1998 commentary on Isaiah, theologian Walter Brueggemann observed that we’re no more attentive today than Judah was then:

“Those dulled and numbed are headed toward termination. These words sound ominous in a society like ours, deeply narcoticized not only by chemical dependence, but by a host of numbing dependencies: poverty and wealth in the extreme, brutality, militarism, self-indulgence — the same list of which the ancient poets spoke so relentlessly. Not noticing leads to termination.”

All this makes the ICE video deeply — and unintentionally — ironic. By employing Isaiah’s words to justify their oppression of immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security illustrates Isaiah’s very point: We have read the prophet’s words; we have all the information we need to know what God calls us to do. The prophets speak with one voice on our obligation to care for refugees and treat the immigrants among us as though they’re already part of us. That we persist in doing harm to immigrants is evidence of our defiance of God. ICE’s wickedness calls judgement down upon them —and upon all of us who do nothing to resist their evil actions.

In other words, the video rips Isaiah’s call narrative out of its original context to baptize ICE’s war on non-white Americans.