DHS Is Posting Americana Paintings and Migrant Mugshots. The Art World Is Not Happy.

The Department of Homeland Security’s social media feed in early July was largely filled with images of “Alligator Alcatraz” and promises to “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN” by deporting the “WORST OF THE WORST.”

Then the agency shared an image of Thomas Kinkade’s “Morning Pledge,” a painting depicting children walking to a schoolhouse where an American flag towers in the yard.

“Protect the Homeland,” DHS wrote.

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The painting was one of three that DHS posted on social media in July depicting idealized images of American life. The others include 19th-century painter John Gast’s controversial “American Progress” and contemporary artist Morgan Weistling’s “A Prayer for a New Life.” Weistling, the only of the artists still alive, has also spoken out against DHS’s use of his painting.

The images, bookended by posts cheering the administration’s deportation campaign, have been widely shared by conservatives and sparked alarm among the artists, their families and some historians, who see their use as part of an effort to rewrite the past with an exclusionary view of American history.

“There’s one side that’s being presented as irredeemable criminals with no shade of gray allowed in, so people shouldn’t have any reservation about the treatment of these people or use of very punitive measures because it’s a caricature,” said Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, deputy director of the international program at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “Then, on the other side, here are the heroes.”

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The agency recently posted a meme of a skeleton lifting a barbell with the message: “My body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations.” The account also posted an image of alligators wearing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hats with the caption “Coming soon,” as it teased the arrival of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention facility Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) ordered constructed in the Everglades. {snip}

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Then, on Wednesday, DHS shared an image of John Gast’s “American Progress,” along with the caption: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” The 1872 painting features an ethereal woman in white robes floating westward across an American landscape as she carries a schoolbook and unspools a telegraph wire. As she moves westward, Native Americans and wild buffalo appear to flee at her sight into a darkened frontier as White settlers move in — bathed in sunlight.

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For some Native American activists and advocacy groups, the posts from the agency, led by Secretary Kristi L. Noem, underscores long-standing tensions between Indigenous communities and federal law enforcement.

“It doesn’t surprise me that Homeland Security would do this,” said Cris Stainbrook, former president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, which works with Native nations to recover their homelands. He said that when Noem was governor she “pretty much embodied the Gast side of how you’d look at Manifest Destiny.” He cited her dispute with Native tribes who resisted her attempts to dismantle travel checkpoints they had set up during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Banulescu-Bogdan, of the Migration Policy Institute, described the use of the paintings as a “classic technique of nationalism” because they seek to “invoke the mythology of a shared past.”

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