WATCH: DHS tries to make ICE cool again

Cockburn and his colleagues are currently obsessed with the new ICE recruitment video that’s gone viral online. “Allow me to introduce myself, my name is HO HO H to the O V,” Jay-Z, who currently lives comfortably in a Tribeca penthouse with Beyonce, raps over grainy footage of camo-clad soldiers busting open shipping containers, riding rough in the backs of open trucks, and flying in helicopters. It all takes place in dark warehouses or under a dusty, cloudless skies, until the scene shifts to nighttime, and the soldiers raise their hands, getting ready to do violence while lit up in dystopian reds and blues. Denis Villeneuve, who made Sicario, couldn’t have directed it any better. 

At the end of the 50-second video, we see the words, in Gothic gang-inspired script: “Hunt Cartels. Save America. Join ice.gov.”

Cockburn doesn’t think Dean Cain is the target audience for this campaign. This isn’t about busting illegal immigrants in textile warehouses or cabbage fields. ICE is clearly aiming at patriots in the tougher districts of Compton, or the Bronx, or, say, Yuma, where danger is a middle name and a $50,000 signing bonus to kick down drug-gang doors while holding a rifle at eye height seems like a huge career opportunity. 

Your correspondent acknowledges that drug cartels are an ongoing enormous problem, toxic to security on both sides of the Southern border. But there’s no sign in this video that well-funded, well-armed drug lords and their fentanyl-slinging minions exist on the other side of those doors, or just beyond those walls. It’s no accident that the only “cartel” member we see  is some poor innocuous schmo in a pink hoodie who’s about to become a literal dog’s breakfast for a leaping, snarling German shepherd. We assume that badass perrito didn’t have a choice about whether or not it would become a vest-wearing member of the ICE cartel squad. 

The Trump administration has, thus far, done a fine job of keeping American soldiers out of harm’s way in foreign entanglements. But it must feed the military-industrial beast somehow; this video makes it clear that there’s an ongoing ramp-up against the cartels, and that ICE agents are the new front-line grunts. The video has a kind of disingenuous ghetto Starship Troopers vibe to it, as though the Nixon administration had used Jimi Hendrix or Creedence songs to try and lure innocent young men to their deaths in Vietnam to fight communism. Instead of the Middle East or Southeast Asia, the plan is to send a generation to its death in Tucson and environs.

Cockburn gets it: this is 2025, gee-whiz “do your part” recruitment tactics don’t work anymore. Whoever put together this ICE video is hip enough to use a 2003 Jay-Z song and the video stylings of an excellent drug-cartel thriller from 10 years ago. But if ICE truly intends to do this fight, then let’s be clear: it will not be cool, it will not be fun, and the music will probably not be particularly good, either. At the end of this endless war, blood will coat the dust. ICE may be recruiting to “Save America,” but in the end, dogs won’t do most of the dirty work. American men and women will die in this quest. That font really is cool, though.