Photo: Alamy
The Trump administration on Thursday launched Aliens.gov, a new immigration enforcement website that uses imagery and language associated with UFO conspiracy culture to highlight federal immigration arrest data and encourage the public to report people living in the United States illegally.
The site opens with a scrolling introduction styled after the opening crawl from the Star Wars series, accompanied by animated stars moving across the screen.
“They walk among us. For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the opening text states.
A live ticker on the site showed more than 3.1 million “encounters” as of Thursday evening. While the site does not specify a timeframe, the figure roughly matches nationwide U.S. Customs and Border Protection encounter totals during President Donald Trump’s first term, according to data from the House Homeland Security Committee.
The site also includes an interactive heat map using arrest data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Users can search by city or state to view arrest totals, detainees’ countries of origin, alleged criminal charges and suspected gang affiliations.
The platform links directly to ICE’s online reporting system, which the White House described as a tool for reporting “suspicious aliens.”
The domains Alien.gov and Aliens.gov were registered earlier this year by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the United States Department of Homeland Security. The registrations previously fueled speculation online that the domains might be connected to the possible declassification of UFO-related government records.
At the time, White House principal deputy press secretary Anna Kelly responded to questions about the sites by saying only, “Stay tuned!”
The website launch comes weeks after Congress ended a 76-day partial shutdown affecting DHS operations, the longest agency-specific funding lapse in U.S. history. President Trump signed bipartisan legislation ending the shutdown on April 30.
About 90 percent of the DHS workforce reportedly worked without pay during the shutdown, while others were furloughed, affecting staffing across intelligence, cybersecurity and related divisions.
