Aliens.gov fakes – A new White House site, Aliens.gov, uses a UFO-themed “They walk among us” launch to display ICE arrest claims that dehumanize immigrants—while also inflating the numbers and mislabeling jurisdiction and offense data. An analysis found the site’s “encounters”
On a Thursday morning. the White House unveiled Aliens.gov with a 10-second video on X captioned “They walk among us.” For many users. the space-theme looked like a signal for UFO disclosures—an effort tied to a Trump administration disclosure push that had already produced two releases of declassified files earlier in May.
But the site’s contents turned out to be something else: political theater built to dehumanize immigrants. It casts people the Trump administration has arrested as the secret extraterrestrials of UFO conspiracy lore.
Aliens.gov claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested almost half a million people in nearly 12. 000 cities and towns across the United States. The site also adds a detail meant to land with maximum cruelty: in 715 of the locations listed. it identifies at least one person arrested as being born in the United States. In 83 locations, it says every single arrestee is an American.
For each location, the website includes information about alleged criminal offenses tied to the people it says were arrested. In 3. 159 locations. the alleged crime category is “Immigration.” In 1. 082 locations—including Chicago and Minneapolis—at least one of the crimes listed is “Public Peace. ” a category that includes unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct.
What’s more, in more than one-fifth of the locations the site flags as the scene of an arrest, no criminal charges are recorded.
The maps and rows are also riddled with jurisdictional oddities. Puerto Rico, a US territory whose residents are American citizens, is mapped as a separate jurisdiction. In one row, the site lists Puerto Rico itself among the foreign countries the arrestees came from.
The White House acknowledged problems after publication. In a statement provided post-publication. it said aliens.gov “pulls data directly from DHS. which initially included a handful of non-immigration HSI arrests. ” and added that “this has been updated.” HSI. or Homeland Security Investigations. is part of ICE.
After the update, a review of the data found 270,214 fewer arrests listed than before—meaning the version of the dataset initially pushed by the site dramatically overshot the numbers once checked against the underlying DHS-linked figures.
The administration has repeatedly claimed ICE is going after the “worst of the worst. ” but that framing has come under sharp scrutiny as watchdog data has conflicted with the site’s narrative. An April report from the Deportation Data Project found ICE arrests of people without any criminal convictions had 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.
Even the site’s presentation is engineered to provoke, not inform. One of the first elements visitors see is a counter labeled “encounters. ” described as indicating how many undocumented immigrants federal agents have arrested since Trump took office. But the counter doesn’t behave like a real enforcement total.
A code review found that the starting number—3. 129. 580—is hand-typed into the website. and the upward motion is generated by a timer initiated by the visitor’s own browser. 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.
Some of the locations shown on Aliens.gov also don’t appear to be cities or towns at all. One “neighborhood” entry in the dataset is an address in Ohio that corresponds to that of a state-run prison.
Aliens.gov’s origins add to the unease. The website was registered by the Executive Office of the President in March, according to 404 Media. At the time. there was speculation the site would host records about extraterrestrial life and UFOs. after President Trump 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.
Instead of UFO files, the launch delivered a spreadsheet of arrests—packaged like science fiction, and presented in a way that, at every step, tries to strip human identity from the people it claims to have detained.
Aliens.gov White House ICE HSI immigration enforcement UFO immigrants dehumanization cybersecurity web analysis DHS data update Public Peace unlawful assembly disorderly conduct