Analysis of: US homeland security condemned for using Japanese artist’s work without consent
The Guardian | January 2, 2026
The US Department of Homeland Security's repeated unauthorized use of artists' work to promote mass deportations reveals the contradictions inherent in deploying nostalgic cultural imagery to manufacture consent for state violence. By appropriating Hiroshi Nagai's dreamlike Americana paintings—ironically created by a Japanese artist—and Thomas Kinkade's idealized suburban scenes, DHS attempts to construct a visual narrative linking ethnic cleansing to an imagined pastoral American past. The messaging is explicit: '100 million deportations' will restore 'peace' against 'the third world,' revealing the naked white supremacist ideology underlying immigration enforcement. This propaganda campaign exposes how the state apparatus, serving capitalist interests in labor market control and social division, must steal cultural production from the very workers it exploits. Artists from Nagai to pop stars Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter have uniformly condemned these uses, demonstrating a contradiction the state cannot resolve: the cultural workers whose imagery and music resonate with mass audiences largely reject the xenophobic project their work is conscripted to serve. DHS's $100 million 'wartime recruitment' media blitz represents significant state expenditure to normalize what it internally frames as warfare against civilian populations. The selection of imagery is itself revealing—Nagai's work deliberately excludes human figures, presenting empty landscapes that DHS repurposes as a vision of America ethnically purged. This aesthetic choice betrays the eliminationist logic beneath bureaucratic euphemisms about 'enforcement.' The artists' resistance, while limited to individual condemnation, illustrates how cultural producers can refuse complicity, even as their property rights under capitalism prove insufficient protection against state appropriation.
Class Dynamics
Actors: State security apparatus (DHS, ICE), Cultural workers (artists, musicians), Undocumented immigrant workers, Capital requiring exploitable labor, Settler-colonial white nationalist base
Beneficiaries: Private detention industry, Employers benefiting from deportation threats to suppress labor organizing, Political forces mobilizing nativist sentiment, Defense and security contractors receiving recruitment campaign funds
Harmed Parties: Immigrant workers and their families, Artists whose work is stolen and misrepresented, Working class as a whole through division along racial lines, Communities targeted by enforcement raids
The state apparatus exercises coercive power over immigrant workers while simultaneously expropriating cultural workers' labor product. Artists possess limited recourse—their objections generate headlines but cannot compel state compliance. DHS's dismissive response to Rodrigo, demanding she 'thank' enforcement officers, demonstrates the asymmetry: the state need not negotiate with cultural producers whose work it appropriates for ideological purposes.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: $100 million allocated to DHS recruitment propaganda, Immigrant labor as exploitable workforce segment, Intellectual property as contested resource, Media platform economics enabling state propaganda distribution
Cultural workers create value through artistic production that the state expropriates without compensation, mirroring broader capitalist extraction. Simultaneously, the deportation apparatus serves capital by maintaining a precarious immigrant workforce that can be threatened with removal, depressing wages and preventing labor organization. The contradiction is that capital requires this exploitable labor while the state's ideological apparatus promises its elimination.
Resources at Stake: Artistic intellectual property, State propaganda budget resources, Immigrant labor power, Social media platforms as propaganda distribution channels
Historical Context
Precedents: Nazi appropriation of Romantic imagery for fascist propaganda, Cold War state propaganda campaigns targeting cultural production, Historical use of pastoral imagery to justify settler-colonial ethnic cleansing, Operation Wetback (1954) and previous mass deportation campaigns, WPA-era state commissioning of art versus contemporary theft of it
Mass deportation campaigns historically intensify during periods of capitalist crisis and labor militancy, functioning to divide the working class along racial and national lines. The invocation of 1950s Americana is not coincidental—it references the post-war period of both aggressive deportations and manufactured white suburban prosperity built on racial exclusion. The state's cultural production has shifted from commissioning ideologically aligned art to simply stealing existing work, reflecting both technological changes and the difficulty finding artists willing to create explicitly fascist imagery.
Contradictions
Primary: The state must appropriate art celebrating empty, depopulated landscapes and human absence to promote its vision of ethnic cleansing, yet the artists producing this resonant cultural work overwhelmingly reject association with this project—revealing the state's inability to generate legitimating culture organically.
Secondary: Capital requires immigrant labor exploitation while the state promises elimination of immigrants, DHS frames enforcement as protecting 'American' culture while stealing from a Japanese artist, State claims legal authority while violating intellectual property law, Nostalgic imagery of peaceful community used to promote violent mass removal
These contradictions may intensify as more artists vocally resist appropriation, potentially generating broader cultural worker solidarity against state propaganda. However, the state's coercive apparatus can continue operating regardless of legitimacy crises. The deeper contradiction between capital's need for exploitable immigrant labor and nativist political mobilization will likely resolve through selective enforcement targeting labor organizers while maintaining the deportable workforce.
Global Interconnections
This incident connects to global patterns of rising authoritarian nationalism deploying nostalgic cultural imagery to legitimize exclusionary projects. The selection of a Japanese artist's Americana-inspired work reveals how cultural globalization creates ironic contradictions for ethno-nationalist movements that must borrow from the very 'foreign' influences they claim to oppose. The $100 million recruitment campaign represents the security state's expansion during a period of intensifying contradictions in global capitalism, where managing surplus populations through deportation and incarceration becomes central to state function. The artists' resistance, while atomized and limited to individual condemnation, reflects broader potential for cultural worker organization against state and corporate appropriation. Platform economics play a crucial role—the same social media infrastructure that enables DHS propaganda distribution also amplifies artist objections, creating contested terrain for ideological struggle that previous propaganda regimes did not face.
Conclusion
The DHS art theft scandal illuminates how the capitalist state, unable to generate organic cultural legitimation for increasingly naked violence, must expropriate workers' creative labor to dress ethnic cleansing in pastoral aesthetics. Artists' refusal to be complicit, while currently limited to individual protest, suggests possibilities for cultural worker solidarity against state propaganda. As contradictions between capital's labor requirements and nativist ideology sharpen, and as state violence against immigrant workers intensifies, the question becomes whether such cultural resistance can connect to material workplace organizing among both cultural workers and the immigrant working class targeted for elimination. The empty beaches of Nagai's stolen art may ultimately represent not the state's promised ethnic utopia, but the sterility of a ruling class ideology that can only imagine community through absence and exclusion.
Editorial Note: This analysis applies a dialectical materialist framework to news events. It represents one interpretive perspective and should not be considered objective reporting.
AI-Assisted Analysis | Confidence: 92%