Immigration and Customs Enforcement set off a backlash with a recruiting video that critics said longed for an “all-white” America, days after Stephen Miller became White House chief of staff.
ICE posted the one-minute video on X on Thursday afternoon.
“The way it was,” the agency wrote. “The way it can be again.”
The vintage color footage shows a woman drinking a Coca-Cola, a couple laughing by the water, a mother pushing a stroller and Mount Rushmore before pointing viewers to join.ice.gov, the agency’s hiring site.
Every person whose face can be made out is white.
The video promotes an ICE hiring drive that Miller championed well before his promotion.
President Donald Trump picked Miller to replace chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Miller took over on Monday, Nov. 9. The New York Times calls him the architect of many of Trump’s most aggressive border and immigration policies, including mass deportations.
An administration official told Reuters that Miller pushed hard on conference calls last year for ICE to hit aggressive hiring goals. That July, Miller himself urged Americans on X to join ICE, touting a $50,000 retention and signing bonus.
Critics across the political spectrum said the video’s appeal was race.
“We get immune to this but we need to keep pointing out that the people tasked with enforcing immigration law keep fantasizing about an all-white depopulated country,” commentator Richard Hanania wrote on X.
“Oh I get it,” New York Times columnist David French wrote on X. “It’s the whiteness. That’s what they want.”
“This is one of the most offensive, racist, xenophobic, dog whistle for white nationalists propaganda I have ever seen coming out of an official US government account!” Democratic strategist Maria Cardona posted on X.
Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security, its parent agency, had publicly responded to the criticism as of Friday.
The footage leaves out the minority men Miller has reportedly made a priority.
Miller wants to use his new job to win back young and minority men who helped elect Trump in 2024 but swung toward Democrats in the midterms, Axios reported on Wednesday.
Latino voters, whom Trump lost by just five points two years ago, backed Democrats by 30 points this month, according to CNN exit polling cited by Newsweek.
“Another reason the GOP lost big in the midterms?” former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin wrote on X. “This nonsense.”
The refugee program Miller helped dismantle now admits almost no one but South Africans, most of them white.
The Times reports that Miller authored or significantly contributed to the ending of nearly all U.S. refugee programs. In October 2025, the administration cut refugee admissions to 7,500 a year and reserved most of them for white South Africans.
South Africans made up almost all of the 10,258 refugees admitted in the first 10 months of the 2026 budget year, the Pew Research Center found.
Trump has claimed that Afrikaners, a white minority in South Africa, face persecution, an assertion South Africa’s government rejects.
ICE’s promise of a return to “the way it was” follows a 2025 DHS recruiting campaign that made similar appeals, some of which critics said echoed white nationalist material.
One DHS post that summer paired a 1943 photo of the U.S. Capitol with the words “We Can Return,” CNN reported.
Another showed Uncle Sam at a crossroads with the caption “Which way, American man?” NPR reported that the phrase resembles the title of a 1978 book by white nationalist William Gayley Simpson.
“Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome,” then-DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to NPR at the time.
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