Less than two days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis during a controversial enforcement operation, the Department of Homeland Security’s official Instagram account made a recruitment post proclaiming “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” attaching a song of the same name by Pine Tree Riots. Popularized in neo-Nazi spaces, the track features lines about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat,” language often used in white nationalist calls for race war.
The post is part of a growing trend in which the federal government openly embraces the visual language of white supremacy and pop culture cited in instances of racial violence. Over the past year, DHS and its component agencies leaned on mainstream pop music in their social media outreach, pairing enforcement footage with recognizable songs. The approach backfired repeatedly, and the department now appears to be leaning on niche, neo-Nazi-beloved music.
“There was a sense of plausible deniability before,” said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society. Anti-immigrant backers of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement have long been known to spread extremist language and media, but in the past, “those dog whistles were being done by supporters,” she said. “Now they’re being done directly by the administration.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lyrics from “We’ll Have Our Home Again” opened the manifesto of Ryan Christopher Palmeter, a 21-year-old white supremacist who entered a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2023, and killed three Black people. Palmeter’s 27-page document echoed the writings of other mass killers, including Brenton Tarrant, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, had praised the former white ethnostate of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and framed his attack as part of a broader racial struggle.
Many recent attackers have been shaped by online extremist culture, Marwick pointed out. “These are young men who were embedded in online communities where memes and songs and books and slogans become part of this cultural fabric,” she said.
The decision to pair official recruitment messaging with music so closely tied to extremist identity politics, just days after one of its agents fatally shot a civilian, raises questions the department’s cultural awareness and basic judgment.
Brian Hansbury, a social media commentator who tracks far-right activity and posts through his Substack, Public Enlightenment, said the timing of the post stood out as particularly jarring. In online extremist spaces, he said, such juxtapositions are often read not as mistakes but as signals.
“When something like this appears immediately after a high-profile killing, it’s understood as intentional,” Hansbury said. “It reads as a message about who the agency is speaking to and the audience it is trying to reach.”
In other cases, the department has faced backlash for its attempts to use less controversial works of music. Pop singer Sabrina Carpenter condemned a White House/ICE video that used her song “Juno,” calling it “evil and disgusting”;