Border Patrol won’t say why it used a Michael Jackson song with antisemitic lyrics

Two months ago, U.S. Border Patrol posted a hype video on Facebook and Instagram showing agents picking up guns and trawling the desert in trucks and off-road vehicles. “Gear up. Lock in. The mission doesn’t wait,” the video’s caption proclaimed.

The soundtrack, however, said something quite different; it featured the so-called “banned” version of Michael Jackson’s 1995 song “They Don’t Care About Us,” specifically a 13-second clip in which Jackson sings, “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” The video was deleted sometime on Wednesday, shortly after Gizmodo journalist Matt Novak posted about it on Bluesky. Border Patrol has thus far failed to respond to questions about why it posted a video using baldly offensive terms for Jews, even as their use of the song is being celebrated by antisemitic social media accounts.  

The video was posted on August 13 and remained live until Novak’s post began to circulate widely on Wednesday morning; at least one mirrored version remains online. 

While Border Patrol remained silent, antisemitic accounts, particularly on Twitter/X, had recently celebrated the government’s post. Novak highlighted an X account that praised the post with its own overtly antisemitic posting history of sharing links to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and infamous antisemitic hoax and paintings by Hitler. Other posters called the Border Patrol video “based.”  

The song generated controversy the instant it was released in June of 1995, with Jackson and his representatives both denying it was intended to be antisemitic; in a statement at the time, Jackson told the New York Times, in part, “The idea that these lyrics could be deemed objectionable is extremely hurtful to me, and misleading. The song in fact is about the pain of prejudice and hate and is a way to draw attention to social and political problems. I am the voice of the accused and the attacked. I am the voice of everyone. I am the skinhead, I am the Jew, I am the black man, I am the white man.” While Jackson later reworked the song, Border Patrol used the original version.

Under Trump, government social media accounts—including those of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the White House—all use a heavy mix of trolling, dehumanizing language and overtly white supremacist references to communicate. Their use of music is pointed too, and generally deployed without permission from the artists: Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes” to celebrate Border Patrol’s surveillance equipment, for instance, or Lana del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness” over a montage of agents being deployed against anti-ICE protests.

It seems unlikely that there was no thought behind the use of Jackson’s lyric. While representatives for Border Patrol acknowledged receiving my questions about the post, they did not answer or explain why the post was deleted before publication. The Trump Administration has previously refused to answer questions about who’s behind their troll-and-meme heavy social media strategy. The administration has also claimed to be fighting antisemitism, chiefly through a multi-agency task force that claims to investigate alleged antisemitic activity at colleges and universities.