An area-themed White Home web site that mocks immigrants and compares them to extraterrestrials claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested nearly half 1,000,000 folks in practically 12,000 cities and cities in america. In 715 of the places listed, the positioning identifies at the very least one of many folks arrested as being born in america. In 83 of the places, each single arrestee is reported to be an American.
The White Home unveiled the web site, Aliens.gov, on Thursday after teasing the launch on X with a 10-second video captioned “They stroll amongst us,” main many customers to suspect an announcement about UFOs—the topic of an ongoing Trump administration disclosure effort that produced two releases of declassified files earlier in Might. The positioning turned out as a substitute to be a bit of political theater aimed toward dehumanizing immigrants and casting these the Trump administration has arrested as the key extraterrestrial guests of UFO conspiracy lore.
The positioning consists of details about arrestees’ alleged prison offenses for every location. Individuals in 3,159 places are accused of “Immigration.” In 1,082 places—together with Chicago and Minneapolis—at the very least one of many crimes supposedly dedicated by the arrestees is “Public Peace,” a class of convictions that features illegal meeting and disorderly conduct.
In additional than one-fifth of the places the positioning flags as the positioning of an arrest, no prison costs are recorded. Puerto Rico, a US territory whose residents are Americans, is mapped on the positioning as a separate jurisdiction; in a single row, the positioning lists Puerto Rico itself among the many overseas international locations the arrestees got here from.
In an announcement offered post-publication, the White Home stated aliens.gov “pulls information straight from DHS, which initially included a handful of non-immigration HSI arrests,” including that “this has been up to date.” HSI, or Homeland Safety Investigations, is part of ICE. WIRED reviewed the up to date information and located there have been 270,214 fewer arrests listed.
The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that ICE goes after the “worst of the worst,” however that framing has collapsed beneath the burden of ICE’s personal information, pried free by a spread of presidency watchdog organizations, corresponding to TRAC and the Deportation Data Project. An April report from the Deportation Information Challenge discovered that ICE arrests of individuals with none prison convictions has skyrocketed in comparison with the six months previous to the beginning of the Trump administration. In October, ProPublica reported that immigration brokers have held or detained greater than 170 US residents.
Among the places listed on Aliens.gov don’t look like cities or cities in any respect. One “neighborhood” within the dataset is an tackle in Ohio that corresponds to that of a state-run jail.
The web site was initially registered by the Government Workplace of the President in March, according to 404 Media. On the time, there was hypothesis that the web site would host data about extraterrestrial life and UFOs, since President Trump had promised to launch new info in a February Reality Social submit. In anticipation, WIRED arrange a script to watch when the positioning went dwell.
One of many first issues guests to the positioning see is a counter labeled “encounters,” ostensibly indicating what number of undocumented immigrants federal brokers have arrested since Trump took workplace. The counter is faux. The beginning quantity—3,129,580—is hand-typed into the web site, and its upward movement is generated by a timer initiated by the customer’s personal browser, in accordance with a WIRED evaluation of the positioning’s code. The determine doesn’t correspond to any enforcement complete printed by immigration authorities and is roughly seven instances bigger than the actual ICE arrest count since January 2025.
