On New Year’s Eve, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image of an empty, sun-washed beach—palm trees, a vintage car, no people—captioned: “America after 100 million deportations.” The accompanying text, reported by The Guardian, was even blunter: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” (The Guardian)
It was propaganda in the old sense of the word: not persuasion through argument, but a moodboard for power. The message did not ask for consent. It did not explain feasibility. It offered a still life of absence as a synonym for order.
And that’s where the arithmetic begins—because 100 million isn’t a policy number. It’s a demographic event.
The number that eats the category
Start with the simplest constraint: there are not 100 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. The most cited estimates are an order of magnitude smaller. Pew Research Center put the unauthorized immigrant population at about 14 million in 2023 (a record high), and DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics estimated about 11 million as of January 1, 2022. (Pew Research Center)
So if “100 million deportations” is meant literally—100 million distinct human beings removed—then it cannot be achieved by “immigration enforcement” as Americans usually imagine it, because the category runs out of people long before the target is met.
What, then, fills the gap?
One answer is: time. Maybe “100 million deportations” is meant to be cumulative over many years, counting removals and returns and re-removals, the way bureaucracies sometimes inflate totals. But DHS didn’t post “100 million deportations over several decades including repeat removals.” It posted a country after it. A finished state.
And if the implied timeline is political—one administration, one movement, one “year of…”—then time won’t rescue the math.
The second answer is: expand the target population.
That’s the part American officials rarely say out loud, but their actions keep sketching the outline. Consider the scale of foreign-born residents. The Census Bureau estimated 46.2 million foreign-born people in 2022. (Census.gov) Even if you removed every foreign-born resident—citizens and non-citizens alike—you would still be more than 50 million short of the number DHS chose to romanticize.
Which forces the conclusion: a 100-million removal target is not an immigration policy. It is a citizenship policy.
It would require either:
stripping legal status from tens of millions of people who currently have it (including naturalized citizens), and/or
redefining Americanness in a way that captures large numbers of U.S.-born people, and/or
counting people as deportable based on something other than immigration status (association, dissent, ancestry, “undesirability,” etc.).
That is why “100 million” isn’t just extreme. It is structurally different from border enforcement. It implies an internal sorting.
When the agency in charge of “who stays” starts talking like a movement
Within days of the “100 million” post, DHS’s public messaging escalated again. A DHS post on X declared: “2026 will be the year of American Supremacy.” (X (formerly Twitter))
That phrase has no statutory meaning. It doesn’t need one. It functions the way slogans function when attached to a coercive apparatus: as a prioritization signal. DHS is not a think tank; it is the bureaucracy that touches detention, removal, databases, and referrals. When it adopts the language of supremacy, the operational question is not “Is this a law?” but “How will this shape discretion?”
And discretion—quiet, unreviewed, cumulative—is where large-scale redefinition happens.
The paperwork lever: denaturalization as throughput
If you want to make “100 million” even remotely plausible, you need a pipeline that converts protected people into removable people. One of the cleanest levers is denaturalization: turning citizenship into something you can lose, not only for the spectacular villain of civics-class hypotheticals, but as a routine administrative output.
In mid-December 2025, Reuters reported that internal guidance (first reported by The New York Times) directed USCIS field offices to supply 100–200 denaturalization case referrals per month for DOJ review in fiscal year 2026—an enormous jump from historical levels. (Reuters)
Quotas matter not because every referral succeeds, but because quotas change institutional behavior. Numbers turn judgment into throughput. People become inventory.
Once you have a machine that can convert “citizen” into “case,” you have the beginnings of a system that can scale past the undocumented population—because you are no longer limited by that population.
The identity lever: biometrics that don’t stop at the border
The other requirement for mass sorting is identification at scale—not just of individuals, but of networks: families, sponsors, “associations,” the relational map of a life.
In late 2025, DHS moved to widen biometric collection through both proposed and finalized actions:
DHS published a proposed rule on biometrics collection and use by USCIS that would expand modalities to include things like palm prints, voice prints, ocular imagery, and DNA, remove age limits, and broaden who can be required to provide biometrics (including certain U.S. citizens connected to immigration filings). (Federal Register)
Separately, DHS finalized a biometric entry-exit rule requiring facial comparison biometrics from non-U.S. citizens on entry and exit, reframing what had been “pilots” into a comprehensive system. (GovInfo)
Even read generously, these are not neutral “efficiency” upgrades. They are the scaffolding of a future in which identity is less a civic status than a permanent, queryable data object.
And the step after “collect more biometrics” is “query more datasets.”
The dragnet lever: data-sharing as deportation’s invisible engine
Immigration enforcement no longer depends on knocking on doors at random. It depends on finding people—quietly, cheaply, repeatedly—through systems built for other purposes.
Investigations have documented the ways ICE and DHS-linked agencies gain access to DMV and other state-level data. In late 2025, for example, multiple reports and a letter from congressional Democrats warned governors about ICE access to driver’s license and vehicle registration data via national law-enforcement networks. (Stateline)
And surveillance isn’t abstract here. The Financial Times reported a sharp rise in ICE surveillance contracting in 2025, based on procurement data. (FT Visual Journalism)
This is how mass enforcement becomes socially survivable: not by soldiers in the streets, but by “back office” systems that make removal feel like an administrative consequence of existing anywhere in modern life.
The cruelty rehearsal: when detention becomes a punchline
A mass project needs cultural permission. Not unanimous support—just enough numbness, enough distance, enough comedy.
In July 2025, The Atlantic described the rhetoric around a Florida immigrant-detention center in the Everglades. Laura Loomer, identified there as a Trump adviser, posted: “Alligator lives matter … alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.” (The Atlantic)
This is how a society is prepared: through jokes that train the audience to treat human beings as input-output.
The same pattern appears in individual cases that puncture the official “worst of the worst” narrative. In 2025, Sae Joon Park—a disabled Purple Heart veteran—was reported to have self-deported under threat of detention, drawing outrage from members of Congress and coverage in local and national media. (Mazie K. Hirono)
Whatever one believes about Park’s underlying immigration history, the point is the signal: membership and contribution do not guarantee insulation when the enforcement state is expanding its mandate.
The ideology nearby: hierarchy dressed up as “management”
Propaganda needs theory the way a building needs rebar: not because every worker reads the blueprint, but because the structure holds better when it’s been rationalized.
Curtis Yarvin—writing as “Mencius Moldbug”—has argued for replacing democratic equality with hierarchy and managerial rule. In his own writing, he described what he called a “humane alternative to genocide”: “virtualizing” “wards” in permanent confinement with immersive VR. (unqualified-reservations.org)
Multiple major outlets have documented Yarvin’s growing proximity to mainstream right politics and his influence on figures around power, including commentary about JD Vance engaging with or drawing from Yarvin-adjacent frameworks. (The Verge)
You don’t need to claim that any one official plans to enact Yarvin’s most dystopian passages to see the shared grammar: people sorted by “value,” democracy treated as a bug, confinement reframed as care.
And in the same broader ecosystem, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly promoted vaccine-linked autism narratives and described autism in catastrophic terms—language he has had to publicly apologize for, including a notorious “holocaust” comparison reported at the time by mainstream outlets. (CBS News)
The relevance isn’t partisan gossip. It’s the shared move: turning entire populations into evidence of contamination, damage, or threat—categories that make exclusion sound like hygiene.
So who fills the gap?
This is the question the “100 million” image refuses to answer, because answering it reveals the real project.
If you remove millions of workers, consumers, parents, renters, taxpayers—regardless of legal status—you don’t just change immigration statistics. You change schools, labor markets, housing demand, caregiving networks, military recruitment pools, and the basic functioning of whole regions.
And if the target is truly 100 million people, then the “gap” is not simply economic. It is civic: the gap between a nation of equal citizens and a nation of conditional residents—people who may live here but can be administratively reclassified out of belonging.
The propaganda beach is quiet because it is emptied. It offers “peace” as a reward for subtraction. But arithmetic has a way of stripping euphemism down to its skeleton. A number like 100 million doesn’t describe enforcement. It describes recomposition.
The most important verification step, after confirming DHS really posted the image and later used “American Supremacy” language, is to recognize what the verified facts already imply:
DHS did amplify “America after 100 million deportations.” (The Guardian)
The foreign-born population is far smaller than 100 million. (Census.gov)
The unauthorized population is far smaller than 100 million. (Pew Research Center)
USCIS was reportedly directed to dramatically scale denaturalization referrals. (Reuters)
DHS has proposed and finalized expansions in biometric collection and biometric infrastructure. (Federal Register)
Those pieces don’t prove a single master plan. But they do make the arithmetic unavoidable:
If the state wants “100 million,” it must first decide—explicitly or through discretion—who counts as American.
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