A Registry: The Alarm Legacy Media has not yet Rung

A registry, an app, and an ad campaign. Why we should be alarmed. An opinion.

There is the before, and there is the after.

Split seconds that shifts your reality.
Moments when the world tilts on it’s axis.

I had one such moment yesterday.

Myself and half a dozen other residents waited in line at a post office. The room smelt of soy ink, musty paper, and, perhaps, a hint of impatience.

Furiously, so as not to reach the front of the line unprepared, I scribbled an address on a pink envelope. Just as I was adding the zip code, the radio caught my ear. Not because an ear worm droned over the airways. No. Rising from a musical score orchestrated for an investigative journalism exposé, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, spoke the words “aliens,” “register,” and “rapist.”

I caught the last bits of the message on my phone.

“Do what’s right. Leave now.” A thinly-veiled threat served hot with a side of guilt.

While I knew such ideas had been circulating for years, infecting America like a cancer, I had never encountered one on a mix station known for vanilla pop tunes. That evening, the same ad rolled on DisneyPlus, this time before an episode of Abbott Elementary.

A quick search and I discovered a 30-second version of the ad. It opens with photographs of three men: Jose Fernando-Perez, Luis Miguel Perez-Miranda, and Luis Angel Alvarez-Alvarez. An “accused rapist, murderer, and child pornographer” alleges Noem.

Screenshot from the DHS ad campaign taken on May 9, 2025.

While these crimes are heinous, none of the named men have stood trial. However, according to Noem they are “all illegal aliens caught because of President Trump’s leadership.”

After lauding the detainment of 100,000 people amid a montage of arrests, images of Noem “touring” El Salvador’s CECOT flash across the screen. She then promises deportation and fines of $1,000 a day.

Not to worry, though, there’s an app. Noem dangles the opportunity to return to the US as an incentive for compliance.

On the CBP Home App website, DHS calls it a “historic opportunity.” It continues by offering a $1,000 stipend, as well as deprioritizing those who register “for detention and removal by ICE.”

According to Secretary Noem, “This is the safest option for our law enforcement, aliens and is a 70% savings for US taxpayers."

All the process will require is a photograph and biographical information. Simple and safe, right?

Screenshot of a graphic on https://www.dhs.gov/cbphome taken on May 9, 2025.

In researching this video, I found two points especially concerning: the registry and the audience.

Registries rarely, if ever, end well. Regimes across the ages have created registries. Hitler did. The US did during World War II before it imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans. Even the Kremlin has a list of “undesirable” organizations.

Though we have been taught about the atrocities preceding from the registration of the Jewish community under the Third Reich, the story of a second registry is less known—the children with disabilities list.

Midwives were paid a fee to report children suspected of having “showed signs of severe mental or physical disabilities.” Parents were then encouraged to entrust their children to state-sponsored facilities. The program was later expanded to “welcome” adults.

They called what happened “mercy deaths.” We call it murder. Conservatively, 10,000 children died. And the adults . . . 60,000.

As I said, registries rarely end well. Given the rhetoric, believing this list will be weaponized is not an unrealistic fear.

Then, there’s the audience.

On the surface, the ad is intended to threaten immigrants living in the US without documentation, to urge them to self-deport. However, they are not its true target; citizens are.

Why else would the ad blow its own horn, using words like “rapist” and rolling footage of mugshots? Why else would it tout a “100,000 arrested?” Why else would the website brag about self-deportation costing American taxpayers 70% less? And why else would Noem promise that “under President Trump, America’s laws, borders, and families” would be protected?

The ad that played that afternoon in a blue county and later rolled before a sitcom was not intended to urge people to self-deport: it was intended to justify our silence.

It is propaganda.

As the Holocaust Encyclopedia reads, “The Holocaust was not a single event. It did not happen all at once. It was the result of circumstances and events, as well as individual decisions, played out over years. Key political, moral, and psychological lines were crossed until the Nazi leadership eventually set in motion the unimaginable—a concrete, systematic plan to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews.”

The Holocaust was not a single event; it was a movement. Generations were taught to nurture hate—permitting their consciences to be absolved. Hitler understood what the Wizard in Wicked espoused, “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”

A popular notion in Washington, I’d wager, though not one it would voice publicly.

This ad weaponizes fear. It turns a survival instinct into a scalpel, amputating the audience’s decency. It permits them to justify their baser instincts. It blinds the listener to the humanity in others, recategorizing their neighbor as a predator and imprisonment in CECOT as deportation.

This moment is not a single event. America has never known a time when it has not been fertile soil for a regime to rise. After all, it was built upon stolen land by the sweat of the kidnapped. Much to her shame, racism and sexism are about as American as apple pie. The groundwork for an abuse of power lies penned between the lines of its founding documents.

So what do we do?

If silence is compliance, then we get loud.

We march. We disrupt. We disagree. We call a spade a spade.

We learn, and we listen.

We commit to persevering until equity, liberty and justice have been secured for all.

And perhaps most importantly, we guard against viewing our fellow humans as a stereotype.

The dream of America lives in each of us. It’s about time for us to rouse from our slumber, wipe the complacency from our eyes, and make it a reality.

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Every week, I produce a publication, sharing ways people can dissent from home or their hometown. Here’s this week’s edition.

We (the People) Dissent also covers the stories of dissenters.