The Trump administration built a wanted poster for a Los Angeles protester and it looked like a Shepard Fairey original. It wasn't. Fairey didn't sue. He built his own poster campaign instead and aimed it straight back at the people who copied him.
A wanted poster in someone else's handwriting
In 2026, an Instagram post shared by Donald Trump, JD Vance and the Department of Homeland Security went up hunting Elipidio Reyna, a Compton, California man accused of throwing rocks and improvised explosives at federal agents during the Los Angeles protests. The portrait style was unmistakable: high-contrast halftone, red and black, the exact visual language Fairey spent three decades building, starting with a sticker of Andre the Giant and ending up on magazine covers and gallery walls worldwide.
Fairey's team told a South Carolina newspaper there was no plan to pursue copyright action over it. But Fairey went after the administration directly instead, calling out what he described as hypocrisy.
Fairey's answer
"Trump's hypocrisy is astounding because when it suits his agenda he says 'let's let the states decide,' but when a state opposes his agenda he brings in federal forces like ICE and the National Guard," Fairey said. He didn't stop there. "The ICE raids are brutal, the scapegoating of immigrants is fascism 101," he added.
Then he built his response out of the government's own language.
Projection Mirror
Fairey released a quartet of screen-printed posters under the title "Projection Mirror." Each one shows an ICE officer in riot gear, baton raised, with a single label stamped above the image: "paid agitator," "domestic terrorist," "intent to massacre," "worst of the worst." Every phrase came directly from statements made by Trump administration officials, including Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, describing protesters and immigrants during the crackdown.
The move is the same one stencil artists have run on walls for decades. Take the language of power, point it back at power, and let the mirror do the work.
Free, on purpose
Fairey gave the posters away. He distributed screen-printed copies of "Domestic Terrorist" and "Paid Agitator" for free at his Los Angeles gallery, Subliminal Projects, and posted the full designs online as free downloads. He'd already run a version of this playbook for the "No Kings" marches, releasing protest posters through Obey Giant at no cost so demonstrators could print and carry them.
Fairey has never fully committed to the word "propaganda" for his own work, but he doesn't flinch from it either. "If you want to call it propaganda, it's meant to initiate a conversation, a counternarrative that isn't happening in a robust enough way," he said.
The bigger stage isn't slowing him down
None of this is a side project squeezed between bigger gigs. In April, Fairey sat down with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now and made the poster for "Steal This Story, Please!", the documentary about Goodman that opened the same month. In June, TIME ran his fourth cover collaboration for its 250th anniversary issue: a modern Lady Liberty built from layered American iconography. His first two TIME covers were Person of the Year: Barack Obama in 2008 and The Protester in 2011. The through-line hasn't moved in eighteen years.
Next stop, New Mexico
Fairey's first solo exhibition in New Mexico, "Cultivate Justice," opens July 17 at Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe and runs through August 10. The show brings prints, multimedia work and originals that toured European museums back to the U.S. for the first time. While he's in the state, Fairey is painting two murals across the Santa Fe and Albuquerque area, taking the same work that started as free handouts in an LA gallery straight back onto the street where his career began.
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