The ads are also an aesthetic departure from their predecessors. Intentionally or not, they seem plucked out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. In a commercial from last summer — in which D.H.S. Secretary Kristi Noem promotes the C.B.P. Home app, which lets unauthorized immigrants “safely” self-deport — she appears in front of a shining red tactical map, with digitized globes rotating behind her, next to cropped videos of her touring what appear to be border crossings. When I saw it, I was immediately struck by how the imagery resembled the work of a single director who often inserts absurd commercials into his feature films: Paul Verhoeven.