For Immediate Release: December 12, 2025

Rutherford Institute Denounces Trump Admin. Campaign to Weaponize Christmas & Turn It Into Deportation Propaganda

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — As the Trump administration proclaims that it has “saved Christmas,” The Rutherford Institute is warning that the federal government is doing the opposite—weaponizing the holiday as a propaganda tool to promote fear, punishment, and mass deportation, in direct contradiction to the core values Christmas is meant to represent.

In recent weeks, Department of Homeland Security agencies—including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—have flooded official government social media accounts with Christmas-themed memes and imagery promoting immigration enforcement and deportation operations. These posts incorporate holiday graphics, festive slogans, and seasonal wordplay alongside messages celebrating arrests, removals, and enforcement “successes.” In some cases, Christmas-themed visuals and captions have been paired with references to deportation flights and warnings aimed at undocumented immigrants—transforming a holiday traditionally associated with peace and goodwill into a vehicle for intimidation and state messaging.

“Christmas has not been ‘saved’ when the government turns it into a branding exercise for state power. What we are witnessing is not religious freedom, but government propaganda—using a sacred cultural and religious holiday to normalize cruelty, fear, and the machinery of punishment,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Christmas belongs to the people, not the state. When the government co-opts religious imagery to advance its own agenda, it turns faith into a tool of state messaging rather than a matter of private conscience.”

For decades, The Rutherford Institute has defended the constitutional right of individuals to celebrate Christmas freely—in public, at school, and in the workplace—without government censorship or coercion. At the same time, TRI has consistently warned against the government’s appropriation of religious expression for political ends. The Trump administration’s self-styled victory in the so-called “war on Christmas” rings especially hollow given its actions. Christmas has long been invoked in partisan culture wars as a symbol allegedly under siege. Yet the real threat to Christmas does not come from inclusive greetings or secular public spaces—it comes from a government that exploits religious symbols to justify power, surveillance, and coercion. Christmas emphasizes humility, mercy, hospitality to strangers, and peace on earth.

There is also a striking irony in the government’s choice of target: the central story of Christmas itself centers on a family forced to flee violence and seek refuge in a foreign land. To repurpose that holiday to celebrate deportation campaigns and enforcement threats aimed at immigrants is a profound distortion of the values Christmas is meant to embody. A federal campaign that pairs Christmas imagery with deportation threats and enforcement bragging is not a defense of religious liberty—it is a distortion of it. “This is not about defending Christianity,” Whitehead said. “It is about a government that increasingly sees no limit on its ability to manipulate language, symbols, and faith itself to condition the public to accept abuses of power.” The Rutherford Institute warns that when the government uses religious holidays as propaganda, it sets a dangerous precedent in which any deeply held belief or cultural tradition can be repurposed to serve the state.

The Rutherford Institute is a nonprofit civil liberties organization committed to defending constitutional rights and holding the government accountable to the rule of law.

This press release is also available at www.rutherford.org.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/wjc3ye2w

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