DHS Uses Black Teen’s Video To Falsely Depict Black Youths As ICE Agent Hunters

The federal government under President Donald Trump really needs to get out of the business of making social media content.

It’s bad enough that our sitting president sits up in either the Oval Office or in some golf cart somewhere, posting racist and/or Democrat-hating AI-generated videos during a time that would be better spent—Oh, I don’t know—running a country that is currently operating without a funded federal government. But, since Trump has been back in office, the social media feeds the White House and other federal agencies have become little more than government-run 4chan threads for MAGA rubes who communicate their political ideologies through memes because they don’t read books.

Last Friday, the Department of Homeland Security posted from its official account a video clip of what appeared to be a group of Black teens mean-mugging into a camera with rap music playing in the background. A caption over the video reads: “ICE we’re on the way. Word in the streets cartels put a $50K bounty on y’all.”

DHS also offered its own caption in a tweet that read, “FAFO. If you threaten or lay hands on our law enforcement officers we will hunt you down and you will find out, really quick. We’ll see you cowards soon.”

Before we get deeper into this, we just need to acknowledge that even if we couldn’t see this is a DHS point—we know that no young Black man in the history of young-Black-mandom would ever have come up with either of these captions.

“ICE we’re on the way. Word in the streets cartels put a $50K bounty on y’all,” is the equivalent of an undercover cop saying, “Excuse me, good sirs, I would like to purchase two mariujanas, please.”

Also, would the federal government puhleeeeease just stop with the social media trends and lingo. The White House already failed to follow the “Jet 2 holiday” trend without being racist, xenophobic and cruel while making light of its Gestapo-like immigrant crackdown—please, for the love of Beyonce, leave “FAFO” alone.

Anyway, DHS’s post refers to its recent allegations that drug cartels have been putting out bounties of up to $50,000 on the heads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents, including what DHS described as a “criminal illegal alien” accused of offering a $10,000 bounty for ICE agents. (It’s worth mentioning that “criminal illegal alien” is also a descriptor Trump officials gave a police officer whom they accused of overstaying his visa.)

Coming from a federal government that keeps trying to convince us ANTIFA is a George Soros-funded terrorist organization that exists in real life, any story about “criminal illegal aliens” that conveniently bolsters any of the administration’s preconceived narratives about “criminal illegal aliens” should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

But, whatever. A propagandist is what a propagandist does. The issue with this particular video is that the federal government has taken a TikTok video made by a private citizen, slapped its own caption on it, and completely changed its intended meaning to suit its own agenda, possibly placing the citizen and his friends, who look young enough to be minors, in danger.

Well, the person who appears to be the creator of the original TikTok video posted a new video to set the record straight.

“I get threats daily on IG and everywhere all over my social media all of a sudden, due to an old video I posted months ago about Iran,” said the young Black man who appears to be the same young Black man who takes down his mask, exposing his face, in the video that DHS used.

He explained that he had no idea DHS had used his video, which he said he has in its original format on IG, and that it was never intended to be used in such a way.

Look, let’s just call the DHS’s post what it really is: a commercial to attract white nationalists who hate the Black and brown people who were both targeted in the ad. This video was basically killing two birds with one stone, but with racism. It echoed the narrative around the so-called threat of violent Latino people coming into the country illegally, and supplemented it with a visible threat of young Black men being thugs, ignoring that the original video was made by young Black men engaging in political satire.

Maybe there’s a reason the Young Republicans are in group chats that are indistinguishable from what a Nazi or KKK chatroom would look like. Maybe anti-Black and POC bigotry is just the MAGA way.

SEE ALSO:

Illinois Police Officer Arrested By ICE For Overstaying Visa

ICE Arrests Black Migrant With Green Card Over Marital Status