Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the principal U.S. immigration control agency, plans to invest 100 million dollars over a year for a massive recruitment campaign focused on attracting people who defend the right to bear arms or are military enthusiasts, The Washington Post reported this Tuesday. The program is part of what the agency calls a 'wartime recruitment' strategy and aims to flood social media, employ influential figures from the conservative and anti-immigration spectrum, and carry out geolocalized advertising campaigns, according to an internal document exclusively reviewed by the newspaper. The campaign seeks to run ads targeting individuals who have attended UFC fights or NASCAR races, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown interest in weapons and tactical gear, according to a 30-page document that began circulating internally last summer and details this hiring strategy. The strategy is executed through ads and influencer broadcasts on Snapchat or Rumble, a video platform very popular among conservatives, but also through an advertising system that uses geolocation known as 'geofencing,' which sends ads to the web browsers and social media of phones located at specific coordinates during certain time windows. This allows, for example, sending these notifications to anyone attending a specific sporting event, a gun fair, or simply approaching a store that sells tactical equipment or a military base. In July, the U.S. Congress tripled the budgets for ICE's arrest and deportation operations to $30 billion, and the Department of Homeland Security, of which the agency is a part, has already spoken publicly about increasing its workforce, which currently includes about 20,000 employees, by an additional 10,000 officials. Since his return to the White House this past January, President Donald Trump has declared war on illegal immigration, and although the data is not yet clear, it is believed that the U.S. may have deported hundreds of thousands of people this year, and more than a million illegals may have taken advantage of a government-incentivized self-deportation plan.
