It is one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian playbook: aesthetic first, policy second. Before the mass arrests, before the street violence, before the bureaucracy hardens into a machine, you soften the ground with imagery that makes the coming crackdowns feel righteous, necessary – inevitable. That is why it matters, urgently, that America’s immigration enforcement apparatus is now recruiting in a visual and rhetorical register that looks, sounds and feels uncomfortably like the 1930s: the decade in which fascism stopped being a crank ideology and became a governing reality.

Let’s be clear: the posters and social-media graphics pushing people towards US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jobs are not merely a bit retro. They are saturated with the grammar of Nazi and far-right propaganda; heroic silhouettes, blunt moral binaries, looming national decline and the call to defend a mythic “homeland”. And this all arrives at a moment when federal agents are killing US citizens on American streets.

The killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and US citizen, who was shot by US Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, over the weekend, shocked the world. His colleagues and family describe him as a compassionate healthcare professional, and despite a statement by Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, saying he was armed with a handgun, he was holding a phone, not a weapon, at the time he was pepper-sprayed, tackled and shot by federal agents.

Renée Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, was also fatally shot in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement two weeks before Alex Pretti was killed. These two citizen deaths are unlikely to be the last at the hands of ICE and many more American citizens have been and will be injured. For an increasing number of onlookers, this is all the bloody result of a recruitment drive that prioritises muscle over training, and whose messaging carries serious fascist overtones.