Internal emails show Labor Department staff repeatedly raised concerns about white-nationalist symbolism—now the same official is shaping Homeland Security’s messaging.
The Department of Homeland Security has hired a social media manager from the Department of Labor for a key communications job, despite posts he made on Labor Department media accounts that raised internal alarms over possible white-nationalist messaging.
Peyton Rollins, 21, was hired this month to help run Homeland Security’s social media accounts, which have become public bullhorns for President Trump’s mass-deportation efforts and come under scrutiny of their own for appealing to right-wing extremists.
Tricia McLaughlin, the Homeland Security representative, said her public affairs office had “no personnel changes to announce at this time,” but Mr. Rollins has put his new position on his personal website. He is now digital communications director, according to screenshots of a Homeland Security staff directory reviewed by The New York Times. At the Labor Department, he was digital content manager.
Courtney Parella, a representative for the Labor Department, said only, “The department does not comment on internal or personnel matters.”
Mr. Rollins has spent most of the past year giving the Labor Department’s social media pages a makeover in Mr. Trump’s image. Current and former employees said career staff members had been pushed aside after Mr. Rollins’ arrival and rarely, if ever, crafted social media posts once he took control. Instead, Mr. Rollins personally posted social media content, which he has included on his personal website.
Agency posts of late have used evocative imagery, some reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s, with phrases like “Restore American Greatness” and “the globalist status quo is OVER.” An image of Mr. Trump, with bombers flying overhead, was accompanied by the message, “One of one.”
Mr. Rollins has also claimed credit for a massive banner with Mr. Trump’s visage that has hung from the Labor Department’s headquarters.
During the period when those posts were made, the department’s social media following exploded, even as colleagues warned superiors that the department’s accounts could be seen as promoting white-supremacist rhetoric, Nazi imagery and QAnon conspiracy theories.
Some employees who have since left the Labor Department said that the agency’s posts had grown increasingly questionable.
“We’re used to seeing posts about things like apprenticeships, benefits and unions,” said Helen Luryi, who was on the communications team for the department’s Women’s Bureau until she left in April. “Then,” she continued in an interview, “all of a sudden, we get white-nationalist rhetoric.”
In more than a dozen internal emails and Microsoft Teams conversations obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rollins’s co-workers at the Labor Department’s Office of Public Affairs repeatedly raised similar concerns. Colleagues expressed personal discomfort with the posts, cited data showing engagement with right-wing extremists, and urged a more moderate messaging style.
Those concerns did not stop the posts.
Now Mr. Rollins is jumping from a department with about 15,000 employees to one with 222,000, and nearly five times the social media followers.
Egan Reich, who worked at the Labor Department for 15 years, leaving in April from his latest job as the Office of Public Affairs’ director of media and editorial services, said career staff members had lost their input on social media accounts. I have overlapped briefly with Mr. Rollins.
“It’s incredibly chilling and disappointing, and I do feel it diminishes the work of my colleagues and I did over the years to educate people about the government,” Mr. Reich said.
Mr. Rollins worked for then-Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Republican of Oregon, before he graduated from George Washington University. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer lost her bid for re-election in 2024, then was confirmed in 2025 as Mr. Trump’s labor secretary, bringing Mr. Rollins into the federal government.
In a December email, a public affairs official at the Labor Department told a supervisor that one department post had received hundreds of negative comments because it used Confederate imagery and a font reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
The typeface in the post, called Fraktur, had been used in early Nazi government documents and on the original cover of Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf.”
The email also flagged negative feedback relating to imagery in the same post that showed 11 stars, the same number as appeared on one of the Confederate flags.
