Is the DHS Smuggling White Supremacist Codes Into Government Press Releases?
Peruse the pages of press releases issued by the Department of Homeland Security, and by and large they tend to be written in a boilerplate, dispassionate administrative tone: “Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen to Travel to Israel”, for example, or “DHS Secretary Nielsen Joins Vice President Pence Along the Southern Border.”
Occasionally there is a bit of editorializing. “To Make America Safe Again, We Must End Sanctuary Cities and Remove Criminal Aliens,” reads a headline from February 15. “Unaccompanied Alien Children and Family Units Are Flooding the Border Because of Catch and Release Loopholes” alleges another from that same day, which, for context, happened to be the day after 17 students were murdered at school in Parkland, Florida.
Turns out whoever was in charge of messaging on February 15 was feeling cute, getting a little too worked up about the idea of turning immigrants away and removing “criminal aliens” from the homeland. Nestled among a series of stridently anti-immigration posts came this gem: “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again.”
If that phrasing sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because it borrows its rhythm and structure from another, somewhat more infamous sentence, known as the Fourteen Words.
“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
The Fourteen Words, which itself echoes a passage from Mein Kamph, has become something of a rallying cry for white supremacists and racially motivated internet trolls. It’s often paired with the number 88 (h being the 8th letter of the alphabet, making it code for Heil Hitler), and used as a means to intimidated people of color or Jewish people online. White supremacist troll Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, is currently being removed from payment platforms like PayPal after sending $14.88 to a Jewish reporter as a provocation. Sending money to the libs to, uh, own the libs.
The message is often framed in the form of a joke, smuggling the horror of its intent through a cutesy, winking type of internet-speak, which appears to be what someone on thecommunications team at DHS had in mind when they published the press release in question.
When asked for comment about the similarities in the phrasing on their site and the Fourteen Words, DHS spokesperson Katie Waldman dismissed the implication as a conspiracy theory, “beneath any credible media outlet”, and attempted to conflate it with other entreaties toward securing the border from Democrats like Nancy Pelosi. You can read her response in full below, which was provided on background, an agreement that had not been established beforehand.
Even if you were inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here about the phrase in question, there’s another part of the press release that makes the winking allusion to white supremacy rhetoric harder to ignore. Toward the end of the 14 items, themselves all misleading, cherry picked, or manipulated statistics about the invading horde of barbarians at our southern border, is one truly bizarre stat.
“As of FY 17, the asylum grant rate for defensive applications in immigration court is approximately 30%,” it reads.
“On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.”
13 out of 88. Never before in the history of statistics has anyone used 88 as a denominator. What could its inclusion here possibly mean?
To be clear, this could just be an exceptionally dumb coincidence, but is there really any reason to dismiss the idea that there are white supremacists laboring in the Trump administration, whose policies andrhetoric are so regularly and explicitly coded in the language of white supremacy? The actions being taken by DHS at the moment, the Muslim travel ban, the forced separation of families, the shuttling of babies around the country in the middle of the night, the failure to account for the whereabouts of children, and the attempt to turn immigrants seeking asylum from exceptionally violent conditions at home into the very exemplars of the gangs they are often fleeing are all bad enough. You do not need to unpack a series of clues to come to the conclusion that this administration’s agenda is white supremacy at work. But there’s something particularly vile about doing it all with a sense of mischievous trolling glee. What fun this must be for all of them.
