Last May, the Trump administration launched a website designed to track down and arrest undocumented migrants across the United States.

Last May, the Trump administration launched a website designed to track down and arrest undocumented migrants across the United States.

Playing on the ambiguity of the term ‘aliens’, the online platform portrays Washington’s anti-immigration policy as a system combining science-fiction entertainment with large-scale surveillance.

Playing on the ambiguity of the term ‘aliens’, the online platform portrays Washington’s anti-immigration policy as a system combining science-fiction entertainment with large-scale surveillance.

A linguistic analysis of this website highlights a digital process of dehumanising undocumented migrants, who are portrayed as hidden threats that need to be flushed out and deported.

A linguistic analysis of this website highlights a digital process of dehumanising undocumented migrants, who are portrayed as hidden threats that need to be flushed out and deported.

Launched on May 29 2026, the White House webpage Aliens.gov appears to belong to the world of science fiction. Its visual universe evokes secrecy, extraterrestrial life, government files, hidden truths, and UFO mythology.

The page uses dark colours, luminous green lettering, references to “declassified” information, and the dramatic sentence “They walk among us”. The reader is invited to scroll through what looks like a playful, conspiratorial, X-Files-style interface.

Then comes the twist: the object of the page is not declassified information about the existence of extraterrestrial life. The aliens in question are migrants described as “illegals”.

This shift is the page’s central rhetorical mechanism. It plays on the double meaning of alien: a legal term for a non-citizen, and a popular term for a being from another planet. By activating the second meaning before redirecting it toward migrants without regular status, the page turns a legal category into a scene of strangeness, secrecy and threat.

From non-citizen to non-human

Before the page makes any explicit argument, one word has already shaped the meaning.

Call someone an “undocumented migrant” and the reader may think of law, paperwork, or border policy. Call the same person an “alien”, surround the word with UFO imagery, and a different picture appears: not a person with a story, but a strange and dangerous presence to be detected.

That is where the dehumanising work begins. The page does not need to state that undocumented migrants are less than human. It weakens their personhood by making them appear first as a category of threat rather than as people with names, voices, families, motives or histories.

Nick Haslam’s work on dehumanisation helps explain this mechanism. Dehumanisation can deny people full human........

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