The Department of Homeland Security typically posts policy announcements and media appearances by its officials on X. But on Wednesday it posted an image of an old oil painting. That work of art, titled “American Progress,” is an iconic representation of American westward expansion in the 19th century and was painted by John Gast in 1872. It also gives the public plenty of clues about who DHS thinks belongs in America as it presides over a brutal mass deportation operation.
You don’t need to be an art history major to pick up on the reactionary subtext of DHS’ messaging.
“American Progress” shows a gigantic and angelic-looking blond woman with fair skin striding westward across the American plains carrying a book. Behind her, in the East, are trains, farms and boats lit up by a rising sun. At her feet are settlers heading West on wagons. And in front of her — the West — are Native Americans, along with buffalo and other wild animals, cast in darkness and beneath an overcast sky. In its post of the painting, DHS named the painting and wrote: “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”
According to the publisher George Crofutt, who commissioned the painting, the woman is “bearing on her forehead the ‘Star of Empire’”; her book represents “enlightenment”; and in her left hand she carries “the slender wires of the telegraph, that are to flash intelligence throughout the land.” The woman traversing the plains symbolizes many of the themes of “manifest destiny,” the idea that American westward expansion was providential and benevolent.
And earlier in July, DHS posted another oil painting — which it mistitled — of a settler couple in the West holding a baby in a covered wagon.
You don’t need to be an art history major to pick up on the reactionary subtext of DHS’ messaging. The agency is promoting the idea that America’s most authentic heritage can be traced back to its history of ethnic cleansing, racist social hierarchies and racial domination. The “homeland” is to be expropriated and protected from savages, and the people who most belong are the European settler class. DHS — the agency that removes migrants from the U.S., often violently these days — is signaling to both its supporters and critics how Trump views the idea of America as a nation. Its recent pair of paintings is a fitting set of images as Trump presides over brutal mass deportations after warning on the 2024 campaign trail that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And the paintings’ evocation of a lawless country where might made right is also apropos as Trump uses his anti-immigration agenda to try to curtail residents’ civil rights, degrades them in punishing detention camps and sends them off to vicious foreign super prisons without due process. It is not realistic to look at earlier moments in history and to expect them to always meet modern standards of morality and social inclusion. But so much of the iconography of the right entails looking backward at American history and finding nothing to object to.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
