A public safety agency is sounding the alarm that ICE recruitment posts will attract violent white supremacists and neo-Nazis into immigration enforcement—if they are not already there.
The Colorado Information Analysis Center, whose job is to gather, analyze, and share threat-related intelligence to law enforcement, first warned about the threat in a March bulletin.
Now, internal records obtained by The Intercept show that the center has determined there is now a “permissive environment to engage in vigilante action and/or violence against individuals perceived to be immigrants.”
The center says the posts in question, shared directly by the official Department of Homeland Security account, are nods to “white supremacy ideology.”
Two of the posts made by DHS included lyrics from “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” a song popular with white nationalists that is frequently chanted by the right-wing Patriot Front during their demonstrations.
One post featured the text “We’ll have our home again” over an image of a cowboy riding a horse, with a mountain and a stealth bomber in the background, and included a link to ICE’s recruitment page. Another featured the lyrics, “Oh by God we’ll have our home again. By God, we’ll have our home again.”
Those lyrics opened the manifesto of a white supremacist who killed three people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2023.
Posts like this have the CIAC fearing that even white supremacists outside of law enforcement will become emboldened to act. It warns that violent extremists could also perceive “ICE personnel, and by extension law enforcement and government officials, as supportive of or complicit in white supremacy, therefore creating perceived justification for violence.”
The bulletin also pointed out the use of the word “reimigration” in recruitment posts, a term that dates back to Nazi Germany and has been used repeatedly by known neo-Nazi conspiracists who claim whites are being replaced with non-whites in the so-called “Great Replacement Theory.”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
The CIAC is part of the state’s Department of Public Safety, which is charged with preventing acts of terrorism by gathering, analyzing, and disseminating information about potential threats throughout Colorado and the nation.
