The lead image on the new Homeland Security Task Force website. HSTF.gov
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The Department of Homeland Security just rolled out a new website for its city-occupying task forces that looks, more than anything, like a vibe-coded pitch deck. Launched on Friday, HSTF.gov was first announced on the FBI’s X account.
We don’t negotiate. We dismantle. The site’s slogan is displayed in the same sans-serif font stylings as direct-to-consumer deodorant companies and AI-powered lease abstraction platforms. The main page is largely consumed by a macho image, presumably AI-generated, of gas-masked officers with AR-15 style weapons advancing in formation through a cloud of tear gas.
Notably, it makes no mention of ICE, deportations, or even immigration. Instead, it frames the Homeland Security task forces as crusaders against foreign cartels, drug smuggling, and human trafficking. Yet the effort is inseparable from the multiagency task forces that have kidnapped and detained people across Minneapolis, Memphis, and Los Angeles. The connection isn’t evident if you look at HSTF.gov, but the FBI’s own website notes that DHS “formed Homeland Security Task Forces in response to Executive Order 14159.”
That’s an order signed by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office. It’s titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and it explicitly describes a plan for deportation, incarceration, and removal of unprecedented numbers of immigrants.
The brand new website describes the Homeland Security Task Force as a “permanent, interagency law enforcement task force created by executive order to combat transnational criminal organizations—including cartels, trafficking networks, and foreign terrorist organizations—across all 52 U.S. states and territories.” But it omits a key line from the HSTF objectives cited in Trump’s executive order: to use “all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States.”
The new website’s creators are familiar characters: The head of the National Design Studio, a year-old agency created by executive decree, is Joe Gebbia, a former DOGE man, current billionaire, and member of the Airbnb and Tesla boards. Then there’s Nate Brown, creative director, who used to work with Kanye West and has pivoted to government tasks. Edward Coristine, the 20-year-old perhaps best known by his DOGE-era nickname, “Big Balls,” says he’s the engineering lead on the project.
In an interview earlier this month with far-right influencer Nick Shirley, Coristine outlined his mission as a federal vibecoder. “We’re actually setting Americans up for growth moving forward, and to believe in the capitalist system and, like, see how it can actually work for them.” He’s been working 14-hour days, he added, and “AI is super important, I use it every day.”
Those hours of AI-assisted labor have delivered (among other things) a shiny new website hailing the 8,500 DHS “agents and analysts” coming to a city near you. Among the goals listed is “dismantling cross-border trafficking and smuggling networks” with a “priority focus” on those involving children—although, in practice, Homeland Security agents have spent months invading cities far from the border and locking children in detention centers.
A year ago, when the National Design Studio was first announced, Paula Scher of the graphic design firm Pentagram told Fast Company that the group’s remit—to make America’s websites beautiful again—didn’t land well, given its work on behalf of a government dedicated to deprivation. “You can’t talk about people losing their Medicare and have a slick website,” Scher said at the time. “It just doesn’t go.”
According to official National Design Studio materials, though, that’s the goal: “To update today’s government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.”
An Apple Store does not lock up and deport people, but maybe that’s beside the point.
