The Gimmick

The White House dropped Aliens.gov on Friday, May 29 — and yes, it looks exactly like what you're thinking.

Green text. X-Files vibes. A video of someone getting beamed up by a UFO and dropped back over the border wall. The official White House X account posted "They walk among us" and let people wonder for a few hours whether it was another UFO file dump.

It wasn't. It's an ICE arrest database dressed up in sci-fi cosplay.

According to ABC News Australia, the site features a live arrest counter — sitting above 3.1 million at time of publication — a map of ICE enforcement activity, and a bright red button urging Americans to "Report Suspicious Aliens" via an ICE tip line. TMZ noted the site leans hard into the bit, calling immigration a secret "invasion" that generations of politicians covered up before Trump "finally exposed the truth."

Creative marketing. Fine. But the data underneath it is a mess.

The Numbers Don't Add Up

Wired reviewed the database and found that 715 locations listed at least one arrestee born in the United States. In 83 locations, every single person arrested was American-born.

The administration's own website, designed to showcase ICE rounding up dangerous foreign nationals, advertised the arrest of U.S. citizens.

When confronted, the White House told NOTUS it was an error — that the site "aggregates directly from arrest reports and pulls data directly from DHS, which initially included a handful of non-immigration Homeland Security Investigation arrests."

A handful. Then explain why, after that statement, Wired found the site had deleted 270,214 records in the updated version. That is NOT a handful.

As of Friday afternoon, according to NOTUS, "United States" was still listed as a country of origin for arrestees in Washington D.C., New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and more.

The Typos Are Embarrassing

NOTUS catalogued the spelling errors directly from ICE arrest reports aggregated on the site:

• "New Orleabs," Louisiana
• "Baltomore," Maryland
• "Minneapolois," Minnesota
• "Miamimi" and "West Palm Beacj," Florida
• An arrest for "gambling" listed in the "District Of Colombia, DC"

Those aren't typos from a press intern. Those are errors pulled directly from official ICE arrest reports — which means the underlying data ICE is generating has quality control problems.

The same city appears under multiple names in the database. NOTUS found 28 arrests listed for "District of Columbia, DC," three for "District Of Columbia, WA," and 1,827 for "Washington, DC." That kind of inconsistency makes any aggregate count unreliable.

What the Data Actually Shows

Wired noted that more than one-fifth of locations flagged on the site show NO criminal charges recorded for the arrestees. In over 3,100 locations, the listed offense is simply "Immigration" — meaning being in the country illegally, full stop.

In 1,082 locations — including Chicago and Minneapolis — at least one listed offense is "Public Peace," which covers things like disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly. That is a far cry from the murderers and cartel members the administration highlights in press conferences.

The Trump administration has consistently claimed ICE targets the "worst of the worst." The Deportation Data Project's April 2026 report found that ICE arrests of people with zero criminal convictions have skyrocketed compared to the six months before Trump took office. ProPublica previously reported that immigration agents have held or detained more than 170 U.S. citizens.

Aliens.gov was supposed to counter that narrative. It ended up confirming it.

Critical Data Problems Overlooked

Wired and other outlets are doing legitimate data journalism here — the numbers they found are real problems and deserve scrutiny.

But most mainstream coverage is fixating on the UFO gimmick and the "dehumanizing" framing while glossing over a separate, harder question: Why is ICE's underlying data this sloppy?

Misspelled cities and duplicate location entries aren't just embarrassing web design — they suggest the agency's record-keeping infrastructure has serious problems. If the data feeding a public-facing government website is this unreliable, what does that say about the accuracy of deportation orders, detainee records, and citizenship verification?

Puerto Rico also gets a special mention: Wired found the site mapped Puerto Rico as a separate foreign jurisdiction and, in one row, listed Puerto Rico itself among the foreign countries of origin. Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth. There's no diplomatic way to describe that — it's a factual error on a government website about immigration enforcement.

The Launch and Fallout

The White House wanted a viral moment. They got one — just not the kind they planned.

Aliens.gov launched with inflated arrest numbers, U.S. citizens listed as immigration arrests, a country of origin column that says "United States," city names that look like autocorrect failures, and a silent deletion of over a quarter-million records after journalists started asking questions.

If this is the data driving immigration enforcement policy, regular Americans — citizen and non-citizen alike — should be asking hard questions about what else is wrong in those files.