"Until the Cities Lie Ruined": The Bible Verse DHS Didn't Finish
How a $100 Million Recruitment Campaign Became a Call to Holy War
On December 15, 2025, Gregory Bovino—the Border Patrol “Commander-at-Large” with the highest use-of-force ratio in the agency—posted a video to his official social media accounts.
The video opens on an open Bible. A voiceover: Isaiah 6:8. “I heard the voice of the Lord saying...
And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’”
Armed Border Patrol agents in tactical gear fill the screen. They suit up. They load into vehicles. They drive toward operations. The narration continues: “God doesn’t ask for the most polished, or the most powerful. He asks for the willing... and ready to move where he leads.”
The soundtrack is Korn’s “Shoots and Ladders.”
Jenn Budd—a former Senior Border Patrol Agent who served from 1995 to 2001—saw the video and published her analysis two days later. She knew exactly what Bovino was telling his recruits.
“Chief Bovino did not put the entire verse in this video,” Budd wrote, “but I believe it is important.”
She quoted the full passage. After Isaiah volunteers, God warns him what will be required:
“Go and tell this people: Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes.”
And when Isaiah asks how long he must do this:
“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.”
“God then warns Isaiah what will be expected of him and the men who follow him,” Budd explained. “They will have to do horrible and violent things and must harden their hearts, look past what they see, ignore what they hear. They must be strong to rid the world of these evil doers.”
This wasn’t recruitment messaging.
It was a call to holy war.
Twenty-two days later, on January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good dropped her six-year-old son at school and drove to her Minneapolis neighborhood to observe a federal immigration operation. An ICE agent approached her vehicle as she turned away from him.
Her last words: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
Three shots in 698 milliseconds.
Gregory Bovino was photographed at the scene.
Part I: The Target Demographic
In late December 2025, the Washington Post obtained a 30-page internal ICE strategy document outlining a $100 million “wartime recruitment” campaign—the largest law enforcement hiring push in modern American history.
The document revealed sophisticated geofencing technology to deliver targeted advertisements to anyone whose mobile device entered specific locations: military bases, NASCAR events, college campuses, gun shows. The strategy explicitly targeted people with demonstrated interest in “gun rights organizations” and “tactical gear brands.”
UFC events. Gaming venues. “Patriotic podcasts.” Men’s interest content.
The demographic was precise: young men, 18-34, with fluency in online culture and demonstrated comfort with militarized aesthetics.
If you’ve read my eight-part series “The Gamergate Army Gets Badges and Guns,” you recognize this population.
In 2014, Steve Bannon looked at Gamergate—the coordinated harassment campaign against women in gaming—and saw something others missed. “You can activate that army,” he told an interviewer. “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power.”
Bannon built Breitbart Tech specifically to cultivate them. He hired Milo Yiannopoulos to speak their language. He transformed gaming culture resentment into political identity.
By 2016, /pol/—the “Politically Incorrect” board on 4chan—had become an unofficial Trump campaign headquarters. Users believed their “meme magic” had elected a president. They weren’t entirely wrong.
By 2019, that pipeline had produced 75 bodies in five months: Christchurch, Poway, El Paso. All announced on imageboards. All using the same language. All targeting populations framed as “invaders.”
Now DHS was recruiting from the same demographic, using the same aesthetics, speaking the same language.
The $100 million campaign included $8 million for influencer partnerships targeting Gen Z and millennials. $74,000 went to Spotify for ads running on the platform’s free tier: “Millions of dangerous illegals are rampaging the streets. Join ICE today.” $50,000 signing bonuses. On-the-spot job offers at an esports arena in Arlington, Texas.
The agency that Bannon’s army had spent a decade pushing toward didn’t need to recruit on 4chan.
It recruited using 4chan’s aesthetic.
Part II: The Message
“Defend the Homeland.”
That was the campaign’s official tagline, launched July 29, 2025. Secretary Kristi Noem announced it herself: “This is a defining moment in our nation’s history. Your skills, your experience, and your courage have never been more essential. Together, we must defend the homeland.”
But the messaging went further.
An official ICE recruitment video, documented by NPR in October 2025, stated it explicitly: “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, we’ve reclaimed our border, secured our nation, and have begun to deport these foreign invaders. Equally important as the task of securing our borders is the task of defending our culture—and what it means to be an American.”
Defend your culture. Foreign invaders.
This is the language of the Great Replacement—the conspiracy theory that animated the Christchurch shooter, the El Paso shooter, the Buffalo shooter. The theory that white civilization is being deliberately destroyed through immigration.
DHS made it official recruitment copy.
Then came the video game imagery.
On October 27, 2025, the official @DHSgov account posted an image of Master Chief and a Marine from Microsoft’s Halo franchise, with text reading: “DESTROY THE FLOOD — JOIN.ICE.GOV.” The caption: “Finishing this fight.”
The Flood, in Halo lore, is a parasitic alien species that consumes all sentient life. It must be exterminated to save humanity.
Immigrants as the Flood. Enforcement as saving humanity.
The post received 19 million views.
Marcus Lehto, Halo’s co-creator and the lead designer of Master Chief, responded: “Absolutely abhorrent... It really makes me sick seeing Halo co-opted like this.”
Jaime Griesemer, Halo’s chief designer: “Using Halo imagery in a call to ‘destroy’ people because of their immigration status goes way too far... The Flood are evil space zombie parasites and are not an allegory to any group of people.”
DHS’s response: “We will reach people where they are with content they can relate to and understand, whether that be Halo, Pokémon, Lord of the Rings, or any other medium.”
They weren’t embarrassed. They were proud.
The Pokémon video came next—ICE raid footage spliced with anime clips, set to the theme song, ending with mock trading cards displaying mugshots. “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.” 37 million views.
Then the biblical citations.
July 28, 2025: Proverbs 28:1. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion.”
August 2025: Psalm 18. “I pursued my enemies and overtook them; I did not turn back till they were destroyed.”
And the imagery that experts flagged as white nationalist coding: John Gast’s “American Progress” painting depicting white settlers advancing while Native Americans flee into shadow. A caption reading “Which way, American man?”—a direct reference to William Gayley Simpson’s white nationalist text. 14-word captions. Capitalized “Heritage” and “Homeland” (H.H.).
The Southern Poverty Law Center documented the pattern. Chapman University sociologist Pete Simi identified the coded references. Slate asked directly: “Is Trump’s Homeland Security Department Intentionally Posting White Nationalist Memes?”
The White House had an answer.
“Six months in. All gas. No brakes. The winning will continue. The deportations will continue. The memes will continue.“
Part III: The Holy War
But the video game aesthetics and white nationalist coding were just the surface. Beneath them was something older.
On July 7, 2025—before Bovino’s December video—DHS posted its first Isaiah 6:8 recruitment content. The video featured Secretary Noem and Border Patrol agents, with audio from the 2014 movie “Fury” and the song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” It was later deleted from X but remained on Facebook.
Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe saw the pattern developing and condemned it directly: “Weaponizing Proverbs and Isaiah, our sacred Scripture, in service of ICE recruitment is a level of grotesque that would have seemed unfathomable eight months ago.”
Ed Stetzer, Professor and Dean at Wheaton College, warned in Religion News Service: “The text is not about answering just any kind of calling—military, civilian or otherwise—the text is about the call of God on a man of God to spread the message of God. Conflating [military missions with Isaiah 6] is deeply problematic and harmful in the long run.”
Jenn Budd understood what they were seeing—but she understood something the theologians missed.
“It is important to know,” she wrote, “that there are many Christian churches along the border who teach this type of extremist Christian ideology. These churches cater to law enforcement, especially Border Patrol. They are xenophobic, Christian Nationalists who engage in men only violent revivals that last for days. They preach that immigrants are invaders, and that immigration agents are heroes enforcing God’s will.”
This wasn’t theological carelessness. This was targeted recruitment into an existing ideological infrastructure.
“Many Border Patrol agents devoutly attend these churches,” Budd continued. “These are the same agents who have been arrested for child sexual assault, rape, drug dealing, sex trafficking and even murder. They engage in criminal activities while also believing they are chosen by God for this mission. This is why they see no problem arresting and deporting immigrants for minor misdemeanors, while they engage in violent crimes themselves.”
They are chosen.
When Bovino posted his Isaiah 6 video on December 15, 2025—all white agents, tactical gear, open Bible, Korn soundtrack—he wasn’t improvising. He was speaking to an audience that had been cultivated for decades.
“Chief Bovino and his men believe they are preparing the United States for God,” Budd concluded. “They believe they must be brutal and cruel—close their eyes and ears to the violence they bring. They must remove and even kill all those they deem as invaders, subhumans and non-Christians.”
On her Bluesky account, she put it more directly: “Chief Bovino and his men believe they are chosen to return this country to a Christian nation. This is not a joke. There are churches that cater to these agents telling them exactly this. Paid for with your tax dollars.”
Part IV: The Training Collapse
Into this ideological framework, DHS poured thousands of recruits—and then stripped away the training that might have moderated their behavior.
ICE academy training was reduced from approximately 16 weeks to 47 days.
According to The Atlantic, three officials said the number was picked because Trump is the 47th president. It sounds like satire. It isn’t. PolitiFact rated Senator Mark Warner’s claim about the shortened training as “Mostly True.”
Mandatory Spanish language training was eliminated entirely in August 2025. DHS said the 5-week in-person course was “replaced with robust translation and interpretation services.” In practice, this meant agents enforcing immigration law couldn’t communicate with the people they were arresting.
But the real crisis was vetting.
NBC News documented in October 2025 that ICE had begun placing new recruits into training programs before completing the agency’s vetting process. More than 200 recruits were dismissed during training for failing to meet requirements. “Just under 10” were dismissed specifically for criminal charges, failed drug tests, or safety concerns.
One recruit at the Brunswick, Georgia academy had previous charges of “strong-arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident.”
A current DHS official told NBC News: “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks.”
Former ICE Director John Sandweg, who served under Obama, warned what this meant: “When we rushed to hire Border Patrol agents, we ended up getting individuals who just weren’t well suited for some of the stressful encounters you have as a law enforcement agent. They resorted to force too quickly.”
Former acting ICE chief of staff Deborah Fleischaker was blunter: The recruitment ads “raise the specter that the agency will recruit white supremacists looking to carry out violence. White supremacist imagery doesn’t really have any place in our personnel hiring decisions.”
The DHS Inspector General is now investigating ICE’s hiring and training efforts to determine whether the agency can “meet operational needs.”
By December 2025, ICE had more than doubled its workforce—from approximately 10,000 to 22,000 officers in under a year. The largest law enforcement hiring surge in modern history.
Minimally trained. Inadequately vetted. Ideologically primed.
And Gregory Bovino was telling them God had forgiven their sins and called them to devastation.
Part V: The History They’re Joining
The recruits flooding into ICE and CBP weren’t joining a neutral institution. They were joining an agency with white supremacy in its founding DNA.
I documented this history in “Noem’s Podium: One of Ours, All of Yours”: The Border Patrol was established in 1924—the same year the Second Klan reached its peak membership, the same year the Immigration Act created the national origins quota system.
“Practically every other member” of El Paso’s National Guard “was in the Klan,” one military officer recalled, “and many had joined the Border Patrol upon its establishment.”
The American Immigration Council documented: “Many officers came from organizations with a history of racial violence and brutality, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Texas Rangers, carrying over the culture of a racist ‘brotherhood’ into the new agency.”
The Texas Rangers had killed between 300 and 5,000 people of Mexican descent between 1910 and 1920 in what Mexicans called “La Matanza”—The Slaughter. They executed 15 unarmed Mexican American boys and men at Porvenir in 1918, separating them from families and shooting them on a hillside.
Six years later, those Rangers—or their colleagues—became the Border Patrol.
The agency’s founding chief, Harlon Carter, had personally killed a Mexican teenager—shot 15-year-old Ramón Casiano over a stolen car in 1931, was convicted of murder, served two years before a technicality freed him, then joined the Border Patrol and rose to run Operation Wetback. I documented his full biography in “One of Ours, All of Yours.”
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, a MacArthur Fellow, spent years documenting what she calls “a sanctuary of violence.”
The violence never stopped. Jenn Budd’s documentation of agents arrested for sexual assault, rape, drug trafficking, and murder isn’t hyperbole—it’s the documented record. The Project on Government Oversight found 382 sexual harassment cases at CBP alone. A 2018 OIG survey found 10,000+ DHS employees had experienced sexual harassment or misconduct.
And the connections to white supremacist movements never severed. The American Immigration Council documented that in recent years, Border Patrol agents have “expressed gratitude toward or interest in collaborating with modern white supremacist vigilante groups such as the Three Percent United Patriots, American Patriot III%, and the United Constitutional Patriots.”
This is the institutional culture that the $100 million recruitment campaign was feeding.
This is what Gregory Bovino’s Isaiah 6 video was preparing recruits to join.
Part VI: The Commander
Gregory Bovino’s El Centro Sector had the most aggressive use-of-force record in the entire Border Patrol.
According to the Project on Government Oversight and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, El Centro logged 300 use-of-force incidents against 83 reported assaults on agents—a ratio of 3.6 to 1. The Border Patrol average was 2 to 1. “No other sector comes close to El Centro,” said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America.
Video evidence from Chicago depositions showed his command philosophy: “Everybody fucking gets it if they touch you.”
On the sanctuary city he’d invaded: “This is OUR fucking city.”
That wasn’t a disqualifier. It was the qualification.
Secretary Noem created a position specifically for him: “Commander-at-Large.” The title has no statutory basis. It exists because she willed it into being for this specific man.
Bovino reports directly to Noem—not to the Border Patrol chief, not to the CBP commissioner. He testified to this under oath.
In October 2025, a federal judge found that Bovino had lied under oath about deploying tear gas against protesters in Chicago. Video showed him personally throwing canisters into a crowd, then claiming he’d been hit by a rock first. The sequence was reversed. Judge Sara Ellis was unequivocal: “Defendant Bovino admitted that he lied.”
Noem’s department called her an “activist judge.” Bovino remained in command.
By December 2025, four federal judges in four jurisdictions had confronted Bovino’s conduct or his agents’ operations. Courts weren’t authorities to be obeyed. They were obstacles to be defied.
Then Bovino posted Isaiah 6.
Part VII: Minneapolis
On January 6, 2026, DHS announced “Operation Metro Surge”—the “largest immigration enforcement operation ever.” Two thousand federal agents flooded Minneapolis.
Gregory Bovino was in command.
On January 7, Renee Nicole Good—a 37-year-old American citizen, a mother of three, a poet, a substitute teacher—dropped her six-year-old son at school and drove to observe the federal operation in her neighborhood.
She was a legal observer. Exercising First Amendment rights. Watching.
An ICE agent approached her vehicle. Video captured what happened next.
Good was turning her steering wheel to the right—away from the agent. She spoke through the window.
“That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
399 milliseconds between the first shot and the second. 299 milliseconds between the second and third.
Renee Nicole Good was dead.
Within hours, DHS labeled her a “domestic terrorist” who had “weaponized her vehicle.” Vice President Vance called her death “a tragedy of her own making.”
Her wife Becca described her as being “made of sunshine.”
Her mother, asked about the terrorism claim: “That’s so stupid. She was probably terrified.”
Bovino was photographed at the scene—one of multiple incidents of ICE agents firing on civilians since he took command of Operation Midway Blitz in September 2025.
The Passage He Didn’t Quote
Isaiah 6:8 is one of the most quoted verses in American Christianity. “Here am I. Send me.” It’s on bumper stickers. It’s tattooed on soldiers. It means: I volunteer.
But Bovino invoked it in a recruitment video for federal agents about to flood American cities. And Jenn Budd—who spent seven years inside the Border Patrol, who knows what the culture celebrates, who understands the churches that tell agents they’re “enforcing God’s will”—saw immediately what it meant.
The passage doesn’t end at verse 8.
Verses 9-10 describe Isaiah’s mission: “Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
Harden your heart. Close your eyes. Don’t let them repent.
And verses 11-13 describe how long:
“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the LORD has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.”
That’s not recruitment messaging.
That’s a promise of devastation framed as divine mandate.
Twenty-two years of pipeline—from a teenager’s anime forum to Bannon’s recruitment to mass shootings to federal power. Then they handed out badges and guns.
On January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good offered grace to a man pointing a weapon at her.
“I’m not mad at you.”
He shot her anyway.
The Isaiah 6 video said agents would need to harden their hearts, close their eyes, ignore what they hear.
Renee Good spoke kindness. The agent fired three times in under a second.
The passage says to continue “until the cities lie ruined.”
The crusade has begun.
Mark Ramm is an investigative journalist and publisher of The RAMM on Substack.
Series Navigation
The Gamergate Army Gets Badges and Guns — An 8-part series documenting the 22-year pipeline from 4chan to federal immigration enforcement.
Part 1: Gregory Bovino Is the Hammer
Follow-Up: Noem’s Podium: “One of Ours, All of Yours” — The 160-year doctrine behind collective punishment
Sources
The Isaiah 6 Video
ThePRP: “Korn’s ‘Shoots And Ladders’ Soundtracks A New Video Posted By Border Patrol Chief Gregory K. Bovino” — December 16, 2025
Crooks and Liars: “DHS Portrays Border Patrol As Christian Nationalist Agents Of God” — January 18, 2026
Chicago Tribune: “Gregory Bovino is trying to steal Chicago’s Christmas with raids” — December 19, 2025 (evangelical pastors’ op-ed referencing the video)
Jenn Budd
Jenn Budd Substack: “Border Patrol, ICE and Christian Nationalism” — December 17, 2025
The Progressive: “How a Former Border Patrol Agent Became Its Fiercest Critic” — September 2022
Project on Government Oversight: “Protecting the Predators at DHS” — April 2022 (Budd contributor)
The $100 Million Recruitment Campaign
Washington Post: “ICE plans $100 million recruitment push targeting gun shows, military fans” — December 31, 2025
Davis Vanguard: “ICE Plans $100 Million ‘Wartime Recruitment’ Push”
Fortune: “Former ICE director warns ‘wartime recruitment’ tactics could attract the wrong kind of agents”
Video Game Imagery
The Hill: “ICE invokes Halo remake, seeks recruits to ‘destroy the flood’” — October 2025
Game File: “Halo co-creator says ICE’s Halo-themed recruitment ad ‘makes me sick’”
Newsweek: “Homeland security compares migrants to Pokémon: ‘Gotta catch ‘em all’”
Biblical Messaging
Religion News Service: “DHS is using the Bible to promote ICE, claiming ‘righteous’ fight against immigrants” — August 19, 2025
ChurchLeaders: “DHS Border Protection Video Citing Isaiah 6:8 Sparks Cries of ‘Blasphemy’”
Baptist Standard: “Homeland Security uses the Bible to promote ICE”
Training and Vetting Failures
NBC News: “Some new ICE recruits have shown up to training without full vetting” — October 2025
PolitiFact: “Fact-checking Sen. Mark Warner that Trump shortened ICE agent training to 47 days” — Rated “Mostly True”
Snopes: “Was ICE training shortened to 47 days to honor Trump?”
Government Executive: “ICE more than doubled its workforce in 2025”
Border Patrol History
American Immigration Council: “The Legacy of Racism within the U.S. Border Patrol”
The Intercept: “The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924” by Greg Grandin
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010)
Gregory Bovino
POGO/American University: “Greg Bovino’s Border Patrol agents use disproportionate force”
WTTW News: “Federal judge says Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino lied” — November 6, 2025
Chicago Sun-Times: “Greg Bovino: 10 things to know”
Wikipedia: “Gregory Bovino”
Renee Nicole Good
ABC News: “Minneapolis ICE shooting: A minute-by-minute timeline”
ABC News: “’Made of sunshine’: Renee Good’s wife speaks out”
NBC News: “Vance says death was ‘tragedy of her own making’”
White Nationalist Imagery in DHS Messaging
Slate: “Is Trump’s Homeland Security Department Intentionally Posting White Nationalist Memes?”
NBC News: “Some Trump administration social media posts mirror extremist rhetoric”
Christian Nationalism
Freedom From Religion Foundation: “Christian nationalist Kristi Noem should not be Homeland Security in charge”
Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Read the whole series at"
https://theramm.substack.com/p/the-gamergate-army-gets-badges-and
I’d love to hear from the marketing folks who’ve created this crap.