The White House created a movie-poster-style image last week to celebrate its deportation flights. “Promises made. PROMISES KEPT,” it read in stylized font over an image of immigrants in chains boarding a military plane. On Monday, the administration shared a series of individual immigrants detained, complete with mug shots.
And this weekend, Dr. Phil tagged along as a special guest on immigration arrests in Chicago.
Immigration advocates told NOTUS they expected the Trump administration to try to make a huge PR stunt out of apprehensions and deportations, but the Dr. Phil cameo was a twist they felt laid the game out plainly. After a slew of bad press on immigration during his first term, the Trump team is eager to claim wins early and often on deportation efforts.
“This chapter in American history is getting sadder every day,” former Rep. Luis Gutiérrez told NOTUS. “I knew the dark cloud was coming over the immigrant community. Did I think show hosts would be combined with law enforcement? What are they? Are they clowns?”
Media personality Dr. Phil, or Phil McGraw, hosted a talk show for years that focused on mental health. He’s not a journalist — although he’s been conducting interviews with Donald Trump and others — and has no official role in the administration. But this weekend, he served as an ambassador for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts alongside border czar Tom Homan.
“This truly is a targeted ICE mission, because they’re not sweeping neighborhoods like people are trying to imply,” McGraw says in one social media post. “I know that because I’ve been involved in this.”
He later posted several other videos, one where he interviews Homan and another where he questions a man being held by an officer on the street, Homan standing to the side.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment on its recent enforcement efforts and how they compare to past ones.
It was both odd and calculated, Chicago Ald. Gilbert Villegas told NOTUS.
“To bring Dr. Phil just reminds you of ‘The Apprentice,’ or some type of reality show, that is trying to sensationalize something that ultimately is putting fear in people that are trying to just fulfill the American dream,” Villegas told NOTUS. “This just seems very bizarre.”
Gutiérrez put it more harshly: “He’s such a hypocrite piece of shit, Dr. Phil, always telling couples to reconcile, always telling people to look to their greater nature, to be more human with one another.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment on its recent
There is a sense among some conservatives that the Trump admin lost the PR fight on tough immigration policy the first time around. As photos and audio of crying children separated from their parents circulated on the internet, the endeavor lost a lot of public support. Republicans in the midterms took a thrashing. Advocates said they think the Trump team learned its lesson.
“They are trying to win the PR fight by showcasing the people that they’re qualifying as criminals,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director at America’s Voice, said. “We had anticipated that he was going to have images of immigrants, mainly men, in prison garb or something along those lines, and loading them up in an airplane, and lo and behold, that’s exactly the image they had.”
Cárdenas said Trump officials have gone out of their way to paint migrants as criminals despite most studies showing that undocumented people are less likely to commit crimes.
“They have somewhat succeeded in defining who immigrants are,” Cárdenas said. “Defining them as criminals, as a public safety threat, when we know that that’s not the case.”
It’s hard to know yet how different Trump’s deportation efforts are from those under Joe Biden. People have been deported under every U.S. president, and while he’s changed policies and made orders meant to drive up deportations, it’s unclear whether that’s led to a shift this soon.
Activists and others said they feel Trump is just making a show of it for political points.
“There were a ton of deportations under Obama, tons of deportations under the Biden administration and the other Trump administration,” Villegas said. “This is nothing more than an attempt to throw red meat at his base.”
They argued that McGraw’s presence emphasized that the propaganda machine was at work. Even targeted immigration enforcement operations that are designed to apprehend specific people can result in the arrest of others who haven’t broken the law. In the ICE operations from this weekend in New Jersey, at least one American citizen was caught up in the arrests. But the framing of McGraw’s posts was all about criminals.
Roberto Valdez, the midwest policy director for the Hispanic Federation, described the videos as “theatrics.”
“He interviewed a gentleman who was being detained by ICE, asking him questions. The thought is, what’s the point in all this? Like, what was your goal in doing this?” he said. “All I can think of is to continue to humiliate our immigrant community and continue the fearmongering, continuing the demonizing.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.