by Deepika Shrestha ‘27

The White House X page posted a video on February 18 titled, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” and the video went viral for the wrong reasons. The video showed ICE agents chaining up illegal immigrants in long chains and putting them on planes. The original video was from a Seattle airport where ICE immigration were deporting illegal immigrants. The only sound in the video is the illegal immigrants being chained up and the noise of the plane in the background. The video received a lot of backlash from citizens with many of them calling it disgusting and dehumanizing.

People that did vote for Trump call the video weird along with the people that did not vote for Trump. Some democratic leaders said the video was not funny and should be taken down. But also some other leaders see the video as the government doing its job. Elon Musk for example had reposted the video with the caption, “Haha Wow,” with the troll emoji and a medal. Some citizens are praising the video saying they love to see illegal immigrants go back to their country. They believe the Trump administration was doing its promise to stop illegal immigration.

The whole point of ASMR is to be relaxing and it’s weird that anyone would find people getting chained up as relaxing. It’s dehumanizing that the federal government would post such a video with a disgusting title for citizens and citizens from other countries to see. It’s even more dehumanizing that someone would take the time to edit the video making sure people see the long chains and the ICE agents. It actually can bring people to not share if they know anyone that is illegally in the country due to the video. There is no benefit from this video being posted or edited for anyone in our country. This type of content is an embarrassment to our country that came from our own national government.