The White House posted a dehumanizing video Tuesday using the sound of detained immigrants being deported with the caption “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”
The video features a faceless person being arrested and patted down in front of an airplane over the sounds of plane engines, handcuffs being laid on the cement, and the chains on their feet clinking as they board the flight.
This comes as President Donald Trump, who has been in office for less than a month, is already straining government resources—with a lack of funds, detention space, and officers—as he tries to ramp up mass deportations.
His administration is also working to employ IRS agents to detain, arrest, and transport undocumented immigrants.
And in January, Trump began sending detained immigrants to the infamous military prison, Guantanamo Bay.
ASMR, which stands for autonomous sensory meridian response, became a popular audible relaxation method in the 2010s. Videos feature people biting into pickles, scratching microphones, whispering, and tapping surfaces, and they have amassed billions of views and a cult-like following.
The White House’s video clearly amused co-president and Sieg Heil fan Elon Musk, who retweeted it saying, “Haha wow.”
Even more shameful—and frankly embarrassing for the American people—is that Trump chose to share the degrading video on the official White House X account, which was previously used as a dignified government platform for formal announcements.
Now that Trump has hit a wall with his inefficient immigration raids, he’s seemingly pivoted to mocking and dehumanizing immigrants instead. Though, making a vicious joke at the expense of another person’s misfortune is the kind of sick perversion on which Trump and his ilk have built their political brand.
Like much of Trump’s presidency thus far, this move is purely cruel for the sake of being cruel.
Campaign Action
