Yesterday, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Public Affairs concerning an AI-generated meme shared to the official @DHSgov X account.
DHS deleted the post today, after criticism from Sikh and Indian American organizations and from members of Congress, and after initially defending it. Our request was filed before the takedown and covers records through September 15, including any internal deliberation about removing it.
The post went up Wednesday morning. It was styled as a movie poster. A robot bearing the DHS seal faced a South Asian man in a bandana, over the words “SELF-DEPORT OR FIND OUT” and, below that, “GET OFF OUR ROADS, YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO DRIVE MR. SINGH.” Within hours it had drawn more than 780,000 views. The image carried the visual signatures of generative AI, including a garbled credit block along the bottom edge.
We want the prompt.
What we want to know
Two things, mainly.
The first is how DHS produces this content at all. DHS launched an internal AI chatbot in 2024 and began allowing employees to use commercial generative AI tools on publicly available information. It publishes an inventory of its AI use cases and describes that inventory as a transparency measure. What the inventory does not appear to cover is image generation for public messaging. So we want to know which tool was used, who ran it, who cleared the result, and whether any of it falls inside the framework the department has already disclosed.
The second is narrower, and it is the reason we wrote the request the way we did. As we put it to the department:
The overlaid caption directs a named individual, “Mr. Singh,” to leave American roads on the stated ground that he does not know how to drive. Singh is among the most common surnames among Sikhs, and the accompanying figure depicts a South Asian man. The Department published this content over its own seal, on its official account, as government speech.
Singh was mandated as a common surname for Sikh men in 1699 and is carried today by millions of people, most of whom have no connection to any enforcement action. The department has said the post referred to one specific individual. The image did not. It attached a name shared across an entire community to a claim about competence behind the wheel, and it did so with the federal seal on it.
That is why we asked whether the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was consulted before publication, and whether any civil rights review happened at all. That office exists and has a statutory role. Whether anyone brought this to it is a question with a documentary answer either way.
It is also why we want the prompt. A prompt is a written instruction. If race, ethnicity, religion, or dress were specified, the prompt says so in plain language. If they were not, it says that too. Either answer tells the public something it currently has no way to learn.
Why we believe this is a record
FOIA covers records an agency creates or obtains and controls at the time of the request. A prompt typed by a federal employee, during working hours, to produce messaging published over the department seal, meets that description. It is not a personal note. It is indeed the working instruction behind an official government publication.
The statute defines records to include material in electronic form regardless of the system that holds it. That matters here, because a prompt may sit in a vendor’s session log rather than in a DHS inbox. Records held by a contractor on an agency’s behalf are still agency records, and we asked the department to preserve them.
Deleting the post does not change any of this. A published record that an agency removes is still an agency record, and the removal itself generates records of its own.
We also requested expedited processing. Session logs and internal messages tend to have short retention windows.
You can follow this request at our FOIA repository on GitHub. We post every request we file there, along with agency responses and any records we get back. Other open requests cover environmental reports for turnkey detention facilities, valuation methods for federal warehouse acquisitions, and more.
Read our FOIA request here.
I read that Hasboro toys came out with an official statement disavowing any connection to the DHS post. I hope they sue for copyright infringement.
Appreciate you all for what you're doing!