The Department of Homeland Security’s latest recruitment video for ICE has everything: A Jay-Z soundtrack, scenes of ICE agents breaking into homes looking for cartel members that look straight out of a movie, and a font flashed on screen that some say looks uncomfortably familiar.
The type ― reading “Save America” and “join.ice.gov” ― looks a little “Nazi-like,” many on social media noted when it was posted earlier this week. The video was taken down Tuesday due to copyright infringement of the aforementioned Jay-Z song, but you can still find reposts of it around the internet.
Do experts ― graphic designers and historians who study Nazi Germany propaganda ― see the resemblance in font selection? Some do. Khara Cloutier, a typography instructor in the extended studies program at CalArts in Santa Clarita, California, thinks the comparison is “absolutely relevant.”
“It’s a Blackletter script, and a variety known as Fraktur was used on the cover of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ and early Nazi propaganda,” she said.
It was a popular German national script for centuries, but eventually it fell out of favor with the Third Reich. The Nazis banned the use of the font in 1941, dismissing the type for its “Jewish influence” and for being too old-world.
