The mega-viral ICE videos that explain America right now

The videos seem to be everywhere. From a Chicago suburb, cellphone footage of federal agents firing pepper balls at a pastor and tear-gassing a mayor and a congressional candidate. Across the city, slick footage of a military-style raid on an apartment complex. From New York, a barrage of photos and videos of civilians being slammed to the floor or restrained in immigration courts.

These clips spread widely on social media. You’ve probably seen at least a handful of them on TikTok, X, or BlueSky. Taken altogether, they provide a panorama of federal agents — usually from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and US Border Patrol — using force and aggression to control crowds, disperse protesters, and seize immigrants.

But the proliferation of viral videos shows something else, too: namely, how Red and Blue America use these attention-grabbing videos to construct two mutually contradictory realities. In one of these realities, the natural response to these examples of state violence is assumed to be defined by a sense of outrage, disgust, and fear. 

In the other reality, however, these videos are a source of glee, curiosity, and satisfaction. To viewers who support ICE’s actions, such videos are regarded as appropriate reactions to hostile crowds harassing law enforcement officers as they try to enforce existing immigration law. The common refrain from these quarters is a variation on: “I voted for this.”

“There are so many different viral moments now, which also affect different American cities and very different populations, that this is becoming a lot more widespread. Even if people aren’t exposed to it online, they’re very likely exposed to it in news coverage of it after the fact,” Emerson T. Brooking, the director of strategy at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told me. “Certainly, some people in the Trump administration aren’t concerned about the virality of these clips — that’s why you’re seeing the use of so much in taxpayer money to try to advance a pro-ICE agenda [online].”

But these videos aren’t just spreading across social media; they’re also breaking into traditional and mainstream media, becoming one of the primary ways that different parts of the American public are seeing, processing, and forming opinions about the second Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. The result, experts say, is a process in which Americans on both sides of the political divide are using the same material to draw wildly different conclusions about reality itself.

Disgust and outrage: the liberal reaction to viral videos

As federal agents rolled out their immigration enforcement campaign across the Chicago area earlier this fall, JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, made an unusual request of his constituents — to document as many interactions with ICE and other federal agents as possible.

“People of Illinois, we need your help. Get out your cellphones, record, and narrate what you see. Put it on social media. Peacefully ask for badge numbers and identification,” Pritzker said during a late-September news conference. “We need to let the world know that this is happening and that we won’t stand for it.”

Pritzker’s appeal was the most explicit sign yet that viral ICE videos, filmed and posted by grassroots social media users, were moving to the center of US politics. Thanks to these creators, the Illinois immigration enforcement surge has become perhaps the most documented crackdown from this year yet. Similar videos have been created and shared in Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, Oregon, but the sheer number of videos coming out of Chicago is overwhelming: as of this writing, there are more than 18 million entries under “Ice entered in Chicago” on TikTok alone.

Take, for example, the ICE facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview that has been the focal point of demonstrations and federal violence against protesters. For weeks, federal agents have confronted and stood off with demonstrators outside the facility’s main entrance. Bystanders, as well as journalists, have captured clips of a clergy member being hit in the head with pepper balls, of a car pushing up against protesters as it tries to exit a driveway, of tear gas being used on protesters, including Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, and of agents shoving and throwing civilians, including congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.

“Video is really pivotal — it shows the brutality, and it shows the unnecessary nature of it,” Biss, who is also running in the Democratic primary for Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District, told me. “There are two functions here: one function is to persuade people who voted for Donald Trump [and] maybe wanted tougher immigration enforcement that he’s gone too far. The other function is to illustrate to people who are fundamentally not supportive of what’s going on, how bad it is, and how extreme it is.”

The wide breadth of this genre of video, Biss told me, is a necessary part of building liberal awareness, outrage, and, eventually, more action. They are both factual, unedited documentations of federal use of force, and also vehicles meant to rally emotion and anger to construct a broader liberal consciousness of what is going on in specific American neighborhoods and suburbs. That, in turn, creates a cycle of virality, the media reporter Aaron Rupar told me. “Having these videos that sort of bring stories to life and makes them more vivid for people, hence makes them more viral.”

An alternative social-media ecosystem is feeding red meat to the conservative base

The recent visit by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to Portland, where another ICE facility is serving as a rallying spot for protesters, media, influencers, and regular people, demonstrates that the administration itself is relying on a different kind of virality to form narratives and flood social media.

Accompanying Noem were at least three right-wing influencers: Benny Johnson, Nick Sortor, and David Medina, all of whom spent days talking up the administration’s approach, amplifying Noem’s narrative that Portland is a “hellscape” in need of federal intervention, and taping footage to confirm that view. They are just three of the scores of influencers who have swamped the area.

It’s a “symbiotic” form of political messaging and content production, Wired’s Makena Kelly noted last week: “these creators don’t just amplify the White House’s messaging, they manufacture the evidence to justify it.”

Brooking, from the Atlantic Council, told me that though it’s hard to quantify the reach of these kinds of videos, the sheer amount of time and energy the Trump administration is spending on viral videos and content creation is itself an unprecedented thing. “The administration’s theory of the case is clearly to maximize the content creation,” he told me. “The extent to which ICE is sometimes being deputized into producing their own content, on top of public affairs teams and on top of the extra money being spent on enforcement…this is not something that has previously happened in the United States.”

He highlighted images out of Portland, Chicago, and other cities of federal agents carrying out enforcement actions while being followed by videographers or photographers: holding selfie sticks to capture multiple angles of an arrest or violent confrontation, and then broadcast them. More recently, that’s expanded to bringing along right-wing influencers to capture their own footage, either embedded with immigration teams or getting unique access to facilities or arrests.

These videos, by their nature, are much more polished and planned out — meant to offer sympathetic views of the agents carrying out enforcement actions. Or, they document the same interactions as videos from the first realm — but shared in order to excite and entertain audiences that approve of the policies. And for that second purpose, they have plenty of eager consumers. Simple social media searches on X and TikTok also show the scores of approving perspectives, boosted by popular right-wing and conservative social media users and commentators. It’s another example of “governing for the gram,” as the liberal writer Brian Beutler put it this week: “a closed loop, where internet-poisoned men and women in power abuse their authorities to thrill their creepy online followers, and those followers perform online in ways designed to get those same bad actors to push the envelope farther.”

Of course, it’s getting harder to tell how much of this is genuine and how much of it is bots or algorithmically fine-tuned content. But that itself is more evidence of just how differently social media bubbles are presenting and sharing critical and sympathetic narratives.

Then there are moments of unexpected overlap. Perhaps the most viral of these clips, of a woman who was bodyslammed by an ICE officer at a New York courthouse in front of her child, was captured by a reporter for the right-wing media site Timcast, from the influencer Tim Pool. Initially, it was just one more piece of content for those audiences, documenting a “hysterical wife of [a] detained alien” who is pushed and shoved to the ground by agents. The first clip in this series only reached about a million X users.

But the violent interaction that went viral in a follow-up tweet broke containment — reaching nearly 20 million interactions and making it headline news for the following week in September. The clip probably wasn’t meant to get so much attention, but it did. The agent in question was suspended (although he was later reinstated). It went viral and got the wrong kind of attention, but it ended up being drowned out by a seemingly endless stream of similar content.

It all illustrates how unique and uncertain this moment is: In the past, one viral video could spark outrage, protests, and action. Now, the public consciousness is split into two very different realms, both of which are producing an endless feed of viral video.

“I don’t think there’s going to be one video. There’s so much content,” Brooking told me. “This is something that the White House and ICE communicators are very cognizant of. … As long as they continue to be producing their own content and narratives, it will remain this endless back and forth.”