The powers that be at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are planning on a massive recruitment drive in 2026—but the people they’re hoping to attract aren’t your typical feds.

The deportation agency has earmarked $100 million for online advertisements over the next year, hoping to draw gun rights advocates and military enthusiasts into its ranks, according to an internal document obtained by The Washington Post.

The agency’s so-called “wartime recruitment” strategy involves a massive hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers across the country. To do so, ICE is coordinating a sprawling social media campaign to target people who have “attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear,” reported the Post.

Some of that cash will be directed toward advertisements on Snapchat and the conservative YouTube dupe Rumble, while other portions of the budget will be dosed out for live marketing via livestreamers and right-wing influencers.

The recruitment blitz will also utilize contemporary software such as geofencing in order to beam ICE advertisements directly to devices in certain areas, such as those near military bases, Nascar races, college campuses, or gun and trade shows, according to the 30-page document.

The plan is a far cry from ICE’s typical recruitment methods, which have historically depended on recruitment from local police offices and sheriff departments to locate experienced talent with potential to grow at the federal level. Former ICE director Sarah Saldaña, who spearheaded the department during Barack Obama’s presidency, warned Newsmax that ICE’s latest recruitment tactics could invite applicants who bring “a certain aggressiveness that may not be necessary in 85 percent” of the job.

It’s unclear just how much of the $100 million allotment ICE has already spent, but the Department of Homeland Security has awarded nearly $40 million to a couple of marketing firms to support the public affairs office, according to federal awards data reviewed by the Post.

Regardless, ICE still has plenty of dough to play around with: Congress virtually tripled the agency’s budget this summer when it passed Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, jumping its appropriations from roughly $9.6 billion to $30 billion. (Meanwhile, the legislature also took a hatchet to Medicaid, gutting billions of dollars from the critical public health care program.)

Just one day after a bombshell Wall Street Journal story on the president’s growing signs of aging, Donald Trump went on a bizarre posting spree about dead birds and wind turbines.

Throughout Friday, Trump posted several different photos on Truth Social of dead birds near turbines.

In one photo captioned “Eagles going down!,” he confused a red kite, a bird of prey, for America’s national bird.

Two days earlier, Trump mixed up a falcon and an eagle in another post complaining about windmills.

Trump’s hatred of wind turbines goes back at least a decade, but the incessant photos of dead birds this week are on another level. Perhaps they can be explained by the Journal’s recent story documenting his rapid physical and mental decline. The story, which Trump is already fuming over, highlighted things like Trump’s requests for shorter and fewer meetings, his belief that a high dosage of aspirin will give him “nice, thin blood,” his difficulty hearing, and how easy is it for him to get cuts on his hand due to his thin skin.

“The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100 percent of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” Trump wrote Friday morning, before he went on to post about the dead birds.

Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot admitted on Friday that it has been posting sexualized images of children on X, blaming “lapses in safeguard” for the content.

“We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them—[child sexual abuse material] is illegal and prohibited,” the chatbot posted, adding that “a company could face criminal or civil penalties if it knowingly facilitates or fails to prevent AI-generated CSAM after being alerted.”

Grok estimated that the victims in the explicit content it generated could have been as young as 1 to 2 years old.

In addition to endangering children, the chatbot has also been posting hundreds of sexually explicit photos of women without their consent. French authorities, who are already leading a criminal investigation of X, have said they investigate the sexually explicit deepfakes, as well.

The Department of Defense has begun using Grok, which has in the past also spread conspiracy theories about “white genocide,” posted antisemitic screeds, and called itself “MechaHitler.”

Musk, for his part, doesn’t seem to have much to say on his chatbot’s recent content, instead posting rants about the “end of Western civilization” and the “Somalification of America” as outrage........

© New Republic