The White House on Wednesday launched aliens.gov, a website that borrows the visual and narrative language of “The X-Files” to frame its immigration enforcement campaign as a response to an extraterrestrial threat. The homepage opens with a dark starry background and luminous green letters that declare “DECLASSIFIED” above the title “THEY WALK AMONG US.” An animated sequence plays the show’s opening theme music while text appears one letter at a time: “they do not belong here… Countless presidents, congressmen, and senior officials knew exactly what was happening. Instead of protecting American citizens, they chose to cover it up.”
The page then pivots from science fiction to immigration enforcement. “These ‘Aliens’ are the millions of ILLEGALS… Deport them all,” the site states. “THEY WEREN’T LITTLE GREEN MEN.”
The wordplay fuses the public’s appetite for hidden knowledge and pop culture with anti-immigrant messaging, said Ernesto Castañeda, director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. “Saying [‘alien’] instills fear,” Castañeda said, adding that comparing noncitizens to extraterrestrials is “dehumanizing.”
The website refers to noncitizens using the pronoun “it” in at least one section. “If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed,” the government website says. “We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.”
Castañeda said that while many may dismiss the page as a joke in bad taste, “for a few people, it may be another license to act violently against people that they may think are aliens, undocumented. They may be another incitement to hate crimes and to profiling people.”
Shannon McGregor, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies media and political processes, described the site as the latest example of the administration’s “memefied communication style.” The government’s communication and governing style is “wrapped up in ‘everything’s a joke, nothing matters,’ as an excuse for pushing the envelope over and over,” she said.
McGregor said the “extraterrestrial” language ties into “white supremacist ideas.” The website warns of an “invasion” of “aliens” and states that “President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.”
What distinguishes the page from earlier administration messaging, McGregor said, is that it is clearly propaganda posted on an official government website. She said the page has “authoritarian undertones,” including “this idea that there’s only one person who can fix it. And the one savior…is Trump himself.”
The website displays over 3 million “ENCOUNTERS” in a dramatic counter, but the source of that number is unclear. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses the term “encounter” to count detentions and arrests, but also applies it to other types of interactions where the agency merely considers whether to enforce the law, according to the Deportation Data Project, a group of researchers and attorneys that tracks immigration enforcement data.
ICE data shows about 1 million such encounters from January 2025 to March 2026, the group said. It is possible the 3 million figure also includes encounters with Customs and Border Protection officers. CBP data available for two periods — January to May 2025 and October 2025 to April 2026 — shows about 200,000 encounters in each period.
A map on the site displays “alien arrests” for thousands of localities totaling 200,000 arrests since January 21, 2025, citing ICE as the source. The Deportation Data Project tabulated over 300,000 arrests from ICE data covering a shorter period.
In a statement, an unnamed White House spokesperson said the website “pulls data directly from DHS arrest reports to communicate just how many illegal aliens are present in our country, and highlight the Trump Administration’s efforts to remove them.”
The website’s source code contains comments such as ”← this is your spacing between lines” and “add some breathing room,” which indicate that at least part of the code was generated using artificial intelligence tools, according to NPR, which first reported on the site. When AI tools assist with coding, they tend to include verbose commentary to help users follow along. The administration has embraced AI-generated media in social media posts and encouraged the use of AI in government, though details on how it has been implemented have been scarce.
McGregor described the website as a rush job, saying it “may be just to generate attention…away from the things that are really unpopular and harming President Trump and the Republican Party’s credibility right now,” pointing to high gas prices and the war with Iran.
The term “alien” has appeared in U.S. law since the 1700s, with one of its earliest appearances in the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. California struck the term from its state code in 2021, calling the language “outdated and derogatory.”
The White House did not respond to questions about why it created the website or about its use of AI.