The Department of Homeland Security Says Trump's Immigration Enforcers Are on a Mission From God
A DHS video lionizing Customs and Border Protection quotes the Bible and includes a song promising that "God's gonna cut you down."
This week the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a controversial video that lionizes the work of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which it suggests is aimed at delivering divine justice to evildoers. The video quotes Isaiah 6:8, which describes the prophet's acceptance of a mission from God, and includes an excerpt from the folk song "God's Gonna Cut You Down."
Critics of the video charged DHS with blasphemy for invoking the Bible and God's will to sanctify CBP and, by implication, the Trump administration's immigration policies. But the puzzles posed by the department's propaganda go beyond its dubious claim of divine authority, especially when you consider the details of Isaiah's mission.
Although no one would mistake President Donald Trump for a religious man, the video is consistent with his grandiose self-image. "I believe that my life was saved that day in Butler for a very good reason," Trump said in his March 4 address to Congress, referring to the attempted assassination in Pennsylvania last July. "I was saved by God to make America great again. I believe that."
Among other things, Trump thinks that divine mission entails "the largest deportation operation in the history of our country." But as he concedes, that project includes "pretty vicious" treatment of peaceful, productive people who have lived and worked in this country for many years. That reality explains why Trump has repeatedly tried to soften the edges of his crackdown on unauthorized residents by promising lenience for certain groups—in particular, employees in the farm and hospitality industries.
As Trump tells it, that impulse is driven not just by the economic concerns of business owners (including Republicans who are otherwise inclined to support his agenda) but also by compassion for hardworking individuals who are trying to make an honest living, albeit without the government's permission. "These people…work so hard," he noted at a July 3 rally in Des Moines, Iowa, referring to undocumented farm employees. "They bend over all day. We don't have too many people [who] can do that."
Trump added that "some of the farmers…cry when they see [immigration raids] happen." He alluded to "cases where…people have worked for a farmer on a farm for 14, 15 years" and "then they get thrown out, pretty viciously." His conclusion: "We can't do it. We've got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties."
Such soft-heartedness appalls immigration hardliners, who understand that mass deportation necessarily involves detaining and expelling people who pose no threat to public safety, people with strong, longstanding ties to the United States who have built lives and families here. But Trump's professed compassion jibes with the avowed attitude of most Americans, who tell pollsters they favor a legal process that would allow such people to remain in the United States.
The DHS video seems designed to gloss over the cruel reality of Trump's immigration crackdown. It focuses on CBP, which is charged with guarding U.S. borders, rather than Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the DHS agency responsible for the workplace raids that intermittently trouble Trump. But the general message is consistent with the Trump administration's portrayal of ICE agents as brave and infallible guardians of public safety.
When a reporter dared to ask White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt how we can be confident that alleged gang members summarily shipped off to a notorious prison in El Salvador are in fact gang members, she was outraged by the question. "You are questioning the credibility of these agents who are putting their life on the line to protect your life and the life of everybody in this group and everybody across the country," she said. "They finally have a president who is allowing them to do their jobs, and God bless them for doing it."
The DHS video likewise presents CBP agents, whose job includes waging the disastrous war on drugs as well as frustrating the plans of unauthorized immigrants looking for a better life, as God-blessed heroes who are beyond reproach. "You can run on for a long time," says the song accompanying images of CBP in action, but "sooner or later, God'll cut you down." According to the rest of the lyrics, "you" includes "that long-tongue liar," "that midnight rider," "the rambler," "the gambler," and the "back biter."
The song does not mention asylum seekers or immigrants desperate to escape violence or poverty. But we can surmise that God aims to cut them down too, and CBP is eager to help.
The video features an audio clip from the World War II movie Fury. "There's a Bible verse I think about sometimes—many times," says Shia LaBeouf's character, a tank gunner. "It goes, 'Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me.'"
Like Isaiah, the video suggests, CBP is on a mission from God—the implication that provoked hostile responses on X. "Since you like Isaiah, here's chapter 16:3-5," said one commenter. That passage says, in part: "Hide the outcasts; betray not the wanderer. Let my outcasts, the outcasts of Moab, live with you; be a refuge to them from the face of the plunderer; for the extortioner is at an end, the plunderer ceases, the oppressers are consumed out of the land."
There is no shortage of Bible verses that might appeal to critics of Trump's immigration policies. Leviticus 19:33–34, for instance, says: "If a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who dwells with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the and of Egypt."
So, yeah, the DHS may have opened a can of worms here, since it is not hard to find biblical passages to support any given political agenda. But the use of Isaiah 6:8 is even more questionable when you consider the verse's context.
What is the mission that God wants Isaiah to execute? "Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes," God says, "lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and return, and be healed."
God tells Isaiah to distract the people from the need to repent "until the cities are destroyed without inhabitants, and the houses without man, and the land is completely desolate, and the Lord has moved men far away, and there is a great forsaking in the midst of the land." Only then will "the holy seed" that remains sprout into a renewed society dedicated to God's will.
"Such destruction did occur within Isaiah's lifetime," notes Marvin Sweeney, a Hebrew Bible professor at the Claremont School of Theology in Salem, Oregon. "The Northern Kingdom of Israel was taken by Assyria in multiple campaign, ending with its destruction in 722 B.C.E. Sennacherib's invasion of Judah in 701 B.C.E., and his destruction of every city but Jerusalem, would have resulted in a very high casualty rate."
Why would God enlist Isaiah to help bring about that result? "Because if the people save themselves from destruction, the overall plan of the book of Isaiah to reveal [God's] divine glory to the entire world would not be realized," Sweeney writes. "By removing the possibility of repentance, God consigns the people of Isaiah's time to death and punishment."
Presumably that is not what Trump meant when he said he was "saved by God to make America great again." But Americans who do not share Trump's understanding of that mission might see the details of Isaiah's assignment as a bad omen of what can happen when politicians claim to be doing God's will.