[ad_1]
Washington: The Trump administration has launched a new website that refers to immigrants using non-human language and encourages Americans to report suspicious “aliens” to a government tip line.
The site, hosted by the official White House domain, uses language and imagery commonly associated with extraterrestrial aliens or UFOs, including green font and flying saucers, to describe a so-called “invasion” by illegal migrants.
“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighbourhoods and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the website says. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception – they do not belong here.”
The White House contends that millions of undocumented immigrants “arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society”, while politicians did nothing. “Instead of protecting American citizens, they chose to cover it up and even accelerate the invasion.”
Text on the website makes an oblique reference to arrests of immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, using the dehumanising term “it” rather than “they”.
“If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The Alien is in good hands,” the site says. “We will take care of it … and return it safely to its place of origin.”
The website also features an interactive tool that allows users to look up their city or town and find the number of migrants arrested there, the criminal charges associated with those arrests and the countries from which the people came.
In Washington, for example, there were 1827 arrests between January 29, 2025 and May 20, 2026, including at least one person from Australia.
Australians were also among those arrested in Orlando, Houston, Oklahoma City, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas and Omaha, according to the data.
The website does not appear to differentiate between arrests of migrants who were in the country lawfully (on visas, for example) or unlawfully. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank in Washington, said the message was a continuation of the Trump administration’s demonisation of immigrants, both legal and illegal.
“The whole point of it is dehumanisation of the immigrant population – that they’re not human,” he said. “It’s explicitly in there. They’re literally dehumanising them in order to justify what they’re doing.
“This is the most explicit that they’ve gotten in that regard – that these people are subhuman, and should be treated as such.”
The initiative, with its emphasis on so-called aliens who are attending school, shopping and living “seemingly normal human existences”, marks a return to the explicit demonisation of immigrants after President Donald Trump eased off following the killings of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minnesota.
It also follows new moves from the Trump administration to crack down on certain types of legal immigration. Last week, US Citizenship and Immigration Services announced green card applicants would be required to leave the country to apply through a US consulate overseas, complicating the path to permanent residency.
About 1 million people obtain permanent residency in a typical year, according to the American Immigration Council, and in 2023, just over 600,000 of them did so from within the US.
Doug Rand, a senior adviser at USCIS under Joe Biden’s administration, told the Associated Press that the Trump administration’s goal was clear: “They want fewer people to get permanent residency because permanent residency is a path to citizenship, and they want to block that path for as many people as possible.”
Bier noted that under the law, the term “aliens” applied to all non-citizens in the country, regardless of their immigration status. “What this is expressing to people is that they are opposed to immigrants, full stop.”
The website also features a ticker purporting to count the number of “encounters” with alien immigrants, which as of Friday afternoon (Washington time) exceeded 3.13 million.
On social media, the White House posted a short video of a flying saucer picking up a human-shaped “alien” and dropping them off on the other side of a fence.
The administration has recently placed greater emphasis on spruiking its credentials on immigration and crime, with the Council on Criminal Justice reporting that the homicide rate in 2025 was likely to be confirmed as the lowest in 125 years of record keeping.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of many administration immigration initiatives, said on Fox News that it was “the steepest reduction in violent crime ever recorded”.
With AP
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.From our partners
[ad_2]
