Administration ‘Aliens’ Website Proudly Announces ICE Has Arrested Over 700 US Citizens

from the evil-and-stupid-are-Trump’s-trademarks dept

This is hardly the worst thing about the administration’s aliens.gov website but it’s still worth noting.

Let’s get to the worst stuff first. The site URL is aliens.gov, which would lead most normal people to believe it has something to do with the ongoing declassification of UFO-related files. That’s something Trump actually made happen, which is weird, because it doesn’t actually deliver him any immediate personal gain.

But that’s not what this site is. Instead, it’s more the same gruesome shit served up by the pin-headed bigots who run the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies. The term “illegal alien” has always been dehumanizing, which is why people who hate brown people love using it, while regular people opt for terms like “undocumented migrants.”

If you choose to visit the site, you’ll be greeted by a mid-budget, somewhat-glitchy, factually-fluid, one-sided take on humanity that reduces anyone this administration wants gone to less than human. The metaphors make it literal: this administration doesn’t think (most) immigrants are human beings. At this site, they’re portrayed as invaders from another world. It’s horrific, gross, and stupid in equal measures.

And it can’t even get the job done properly, as Dell Cameron points out for Wired. The problems start with the splash screen… and get dumber/more evil from there:

Visitors to the site are meant to be greeted by the opening notes of the X-Files theme song, WIRED discovered, set to play beneath a stylized “TOP SECRET” stamp and a warning that immigrants have “shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” The music has gone unnoticed because nearly every browser in the past 10 years has blocked autoplay audio by default.

The music track contains metadata indicating the file was created using late-2000s-era CD-ripping software. 

Jesus. Not only do the nation’s top tech people not appear to recognize changes in browser tech, they apparently couldn’t be bothered to license the music they hoped would help complete their dehumanizing metaphor. Copyright infringement is a crime, and thousands of migrants have been arrested and detained for far less.

It’s not just the dumb tech stuff. It’s also the lies and misleading information presented as fact. Some of this appears to be deliberate, like the “3,129,580” number presented to site viewers as “encounters.” The site does nothing to explain what “encounters” means but obviously hopes viewers will read this either as arrests or deportations. That number actually means nothing at all:

The figure does not correspond to any enforcement total published by immigration authorities and is roughly seven times larger than the actual ICE arrest count since January 2025.

When your only goals are (1) making migrants appear less than human and innately dangerous, and (2) tossing around a bunch of big numbers to make it appear as though this nation is overrun by “illegal aliens,” stuff like citations and double-checking your math fall completely off the list of priorities.

And that’s how a site that’s bragging about all the “aliens” the administration has “encountered” ends up bragging about how many legal US citizens have been arrested or detained by ICE:

In 715 of the locations listed, the site identifies at least one of the people arrested as being born in the United States. In 83 of the locations, every single arrestee is reported to be an American.

Whoops. I mean, ICE is certainly doing this sort of thing, but it’s an unforced error for the administration to admit it on its own website. Linking dehumanization to immigration enforcement data keeps proving points administration officials constantly pretend aren’t real… like the uncomfortable fact that migrants are far less likely to commit criminal acts than US citizens. The data provided on this site shows that at least 20% of all arrests aren’t linked to any criminal charges, including the vaguely-worded “immigration” flag most often used in the arrest stats.

Then there’s the fact that this administration continues to believe Puerto Rico is just another Latin American country that’s flooding the nation with illegal immigrants.

Puerto Rico, a US territory whose residents are American citizens, is mapped on the site as a separate jurisdiction; in one row, the site lists Puerto Rico itself among the foreign countries the arrestees came from.

What usually follows this sort of botchery is apologies and the distant sound of heads rolling. Not here. Not in this version of the United States. Under this administration, no apologies are offered for anything seen here, ranging from the nasty, racist dehumanization of people from foreign countries to the factual errors to the use of unlicensed music.

Instead, we get the government claiming the reason everything looks so stupid and shitty is because it couldn’t be bothered to vet its own data sources before going live:

In a statement provided post-publication, the White House said aliens.gov “pulls data directly from DHS, which initially included a handful of non-immigration HSI arrests,” adding that “this has been updated.” HSI, or Homeland Security Investigations, is a part of ICE. WIRED reviewed the updated data and found there were 270,214 fewer arrests listed.

This is an administration that actively, demonstrably doesn’t care for facts. It’s no surprise that it saw the initial data dump and thought it looked impressive enough to help preach to the converted in the cheap seats. It’s only after people started asking questions that it bothered to look at its own data. And while cleaning this up may make some of the arrests of US citizens disappear, it also subtracts more than a quarter-million-worth of gaudiness from the arrest totals.

The administration continues moving from one dumpster to another, setting each one alight and responding by either claiming its casual carelessness is the equivalent of clerical errors or by personally insulting the journalist and/or the publication they work for. The administration learns nothing from the experience and the wet-brained fucks who dream this sort of thing up will continue to laugh at their own cruel jokes like the pathetic, cruel assholes they are. No one wins, but America just keeps on losing.

Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, ice, mass deportation, rights violations, trump administration