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Less than two<\/span> days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis during a controversial enforcement operation, the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s official Instagram account made a recruitment post<\/a> proclaiming \u201cWe\u2019ll Have Our Home Again,\u201d attaching a song of the same name by Pine Tree Riots. Popularized in neo-Nazi spaces, the track features lines about reclaiming \u201cour home\u201d by \u201cblood or sweat,\u201d language often used in white nationalist calls for race war.<\/p>\n The post is part of a growing trend in which the federal government openly embraces the visual language of white supremacy and pop culture cited in instances of racial violence. Over the past year, DHS and its component agencies leaned on mainstream pop music in their social media outreach, pairing enforcement footage with recognizable songs. The approach backfired repeatedly, and the department now appears to be leaning on niche, neo-Nazi-beloved music.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a sense of plausible deniability before,\u201d said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society<\/a>. Anti-immigrant backers of Trump\u2019s Make America Great Again movement have long been known to spread extremist language and media, but in the past, \u201cthose dog whistles were being done by supporters,\u201d she said. \u201cNow they\u2019re being done directly by the administration.\u201d<\/p>\n The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lyrics from \u201cWe\u2019ll Have Our Home Again\u201d opened the manifesto of Ryan Christopher Palmeter,\u00a0<\/strong>a 21-year-old white supremacist who entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida,<\/a> in 2023, and killed three Black people. Palmeter\u2019s 27-page document echoed the writings of other mass killers, including Brenton Tarrant, according<\/a> to the Anti-Defamation League. Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand<\/a>, in 2019, had praised the former white ethnostate of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and framed his attack as part of a broader racial struggle.<\/p>\n Many recent attackers have been shaped by online extremist culture, Marwick pointed out. \u201cThese are young men who were embedded in online communities where memes and songs and books and slogans become part of this cultural fabric,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The decision to pair official recruitment messaging with music so closely tied to extremist identity politics, just days after one of its agents<\/a> fatally shot a civilian<\/a>, raises questions the department\u2019s cultural awareness and basic judgment.<\/p>\n Brian Hansbury, a social media commentator who tracks far-right activity and posts through his Substack, Public Enlightenment, said the timing of the post stood out as particularly jarring. In online extremist spaces, he said, such juxtapositions are often read not as mistakes but as signals.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen something like this appears immediately after a high-profile killing, it\u2019s understood as intentional,\u201d Hansbury said. \u201cIt reads as a message about who the agency is speaking to and the audience it is trying to reach.\u201d<\/p>\n In other cases, the department has faced backlash for its attempts to use less controversial works of music. Pop singer Sabrina Carpenter condemned a White House\/ICE video that used her song \u201cJuno,\u201d calling<\/a> it \u201cevil and disgusting\u201d; the backlash prompted its removal. Olivia Rodrigo blasted DHS for using her song \u201cAll-American Bitch\u201d to promote self-deportation, calling<\/a> the move \u201cracist, hateful propaganda.\u201d Grammy winner SZA rebuked the Trump administration after her track \u201cBig Boys\u201d was used without permission in a recruitment video. And rock group MGMT had an ICE video featuring \u201cLittle Dark Age<\/a>\u201d removed from X after a copyright takedown request.<\/p>\n Even while making use of mainstream pop music, DHS\u2019s official social media accounts were experimenting with language and imagery centered on national decline, territorial reclamation and cultural threat over the past year. In July 2025, the agency shared an image titled \u201cA Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending\u201d alongside the 19th-century painting\u00a0American Progress<\/a>, a work frequently cited in white nationalist and \u201cgreat replacement theory\u201d circles for its depiction of westward expansion and Indigenous displacement. The painting is closely associated with the ideology of manifest destiny.<\/p>\n In December 2025, DHS shared a meme bearing a watermark from iFunny, a platform that has faced repeated criticism and removal from major app stores for hosting racist and extremist content.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
It mirrored themes that appear in so-called \u201cAgartha\u201d memes, a niche strain of far-right fantasy content that imagines a hidden, racially pure civilization beneath the Earth\u2019s surface. Researchers who track extremist visual culture note that such narratives often romanticize white isolationism and technological superiority.\u00a0<\/p>\n