Big Tech faces new pressure for allowing ICE ads

Amid nationwide outrage over the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two House Democrats are pressing Google and Meta to answer for recruitment campaign posts that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recently run on their platforms. The lawmakers, Reps. Becca Balint of Vermont and Pramila Jayapal of Washington, have accused the companies of being “complicit” with the Trump administration and enabling ICE’s efforts to promote slogans that—they say—have also been employed by white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. 

The inquiries were sent on January 21, and as of Monday, the platforms still had not responded. “What is going on with ICE is a five-alarm fire for our democracy, and these corporations are in it up to their necks,” Balint tells Fast Company. “They can no longer claim they ‘didn’t know.’ They are not only profiting from cruelty but actively helping to perpetuate it at everyone else’s expense. We expect answers, and we expect them now.”

Under the Trump administration, ICE has sought to rapidly scale up recruitment. The agency aimed to spend $100 million on the effort, according to a document reported by The Washington Post last year, and it outlined a ‘wartime recruitment’ strategy that included targeting people who show interest in firearms, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) events, and podcasts focused on patriotism. 

ICE has run about 65 different advertisements on Google since the beginning of the year, according to the platform’s ad library. These posts include a $50,000 signing bonus offer, opportunities to “Defend the Homeland,” and heavy use of Uncle Sam imagery.  ICE—which Rolling Stone reports has spent at least a few hundred thousand dollars running ads on Meta platforms in recent months—has used its Facebook account to post provocative imagery alongside recruitment posts. These include posts featuring a picture of knights with swords alongside the text, ‘THE ENEMIES ARE AT THE GATES,” as well as another displaying a man riding a horse and the phrase, “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.” Some of the posts are more explicit, including one showing a man carrying the Betsy Ross flag with the message, “SEND THEM BACK.” 

The politicians’ letter to the companies aims to draw a direct line between Big Tech’s ad systems and the normalization of rhetoric that civil rights groups say echoes white supremacist propaganda. “Just last week, DHS posted a recruitment ad on Instagram proclaiming ‘we’ll have our home again,’ which is a song popularized in neo-Nazi spaces and used in white nationalist calls for a race war. The same lyrics were found in the manifesto of Ryan Christopher Palmeter, the white supremacist who shot and killed three black people in Jacksonville in 2023,” wrote Balint and Jayapal in their January letter to Meta. “It appears Meta is complicit in furthering this content on behalf of the Trump administration.”

These Facebook posts have racked up tens of thousands of likes or shares.

Though Google, which also owns YouTube, and Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, are the platforms the lawmakers focused on, they’re not the only place where ICE has posted content. The agency has posted job ads or recruitment content on LinkedIn, which didn’t respond to a request for comment. It’s not immediately clear that these platforms are the primary way the agency is actually finding new recruits. Still, the letter highlights that platforms stand to be drawn into the nationwide discussion over ICE and its tactics. 

The companies confirmed receipt but haven’t responded yet, Balint’s office tells Fast Company. Meta declined Fast Company’s request for comment, and Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

The silence isn’t necessarily surprising. Tech companies have a real interest in not ruffling feathers with the Trump administration, and some platforms have, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, already done a major about-face about their decisions to boot or suppress the president’s account. Balint’s and Jayapal’s letter isn’t a new strategy for lawmakers either. Members of both parties have previously pushed platforms to censor or restrain posts that they find odious. In highly polarized times, critics argue that this approach essentially amounts to working the refs, and it seems unlikely Google and Meta would move to censor an official government agency.