The White House’s Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens
In 715 of the locations listed, the site identifies at least one of the people arrested as being born in the United States. In 83 of the locations, every single arrestee is reported to be an American.The White House unveiled the website, Aliens.gov, on Thursday after teasing the launch on X with a 10-second video captioned, “They walk among us,” leading many users to suspect an announcement about UFOs—the subject of an ongoing Trump administration disclosure effort that produced two releases of declassified files earlier in May. The site turned out instead to be a piece of political theater aimed at dehumanizing immigrants and casting those the Trump administration has arrested as the secret extraterrestrial visitors of UFO conspiracy lore.The site includes information about arrestees’ alleged criminal offenses for each location. People in 3,159 locations are accused of “Immigration.” In 1,082 locations—including Chicago and Minneapolis—at least one of the crimes supposedly committed by the arrestees is “Public Peace,” a category of convictions that includes unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct.In more than one-fifth of the locations the site flags as the site of an arrest, no criminal charges are recorded. Puerto Rico, a US territory whose residents are American citizens, is mapped on the site as a separate jurisdiction; in one row, the site lists Puerto Rico itself among the foreign countries the arrestees came from.The White House said WIRED’s request for comment did not reach its inbox until two hours after it was sent by reporters. It did not address WIRED’s questions.The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that ICE is going after the “worst of the worst,” but that framing has collapsed under the weight of ICE’s own data, pried loose by a range of government watchdog organizations, such as TRAC and the Deportation Data Project. An April report from the Deportation Data Project found that ICE arrests of people without any criminal convictions has skyrocketed compared to the six months prior to the start of the Trump administration. In October, ProPublica reported that immigration agents have held or detained more than 170 US citizens.Some of the locations listed on Aliens.gov don’t appear to be cities or towns at all. One “neighborhood” in the dataset is an address in Ohio that corresponds to that of a state-run prison.The website was originally registered by the Executive Office of the President in March, according to 404 Media. At the time, there was speculation that the website would host records about extraterrestrial life and UFOs, since Trump had promised to release new information in a February Truth Social post. In anticipation, WIRED set up a script to monitor when the site went live.One of the first things visitors to the site see is a counter labeled “encounters,” ostensibly indicating how many undocumented immigrants federal agents have arrested since Trump took office. The counter is fake. The starting number—3,129,580—is hand-typed into the website, and its upward motion is generated by a timer initiated by the visitor’s own browser, according to a WIRED analysis of the site’s code. The figure does not correspond to any enforcement total published by immigration authorities and is roughly seven times larger than the actual ICE arrest count since January 2025.Visitors to the site are meant to be greeted by the opening notes of the X-Files theme song, WIRED discovered, set to play beneath a stylized “TOP SECRET” stamp and a warning that immigrants have “shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” The music has gone unnoticed because nearly every browser in the past 10 years has blocked autoplay
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