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On Monday morning, the Trump administration used a picture of Halo’s Master Chief to call for the destruction of immigrants. This administration is no stranger to appropriating pop culture for its propaganda, but something about seeing the stalwart hero of a beloved video game twisted into an anti-immigrant super soldier hit people pretty hard.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration shared AI-generated Halo memes across its social media accounts. This culminated in the official Department of Homeland Security accounts sharing an image of dudes in Spartan armor riding a Warthog under the words “DESTROY THE FLOOD JOIN.ICE.GOV.” It was this image, in particular, that got in people’s heads.
In the fiction of Halo, the Flood is a parasitic creature that infects sentient life and turns them into monsters whose only desire is to spread the parasite. They’re depicted as a brainless and fast moving wave of flesh that could not be reasoned with.
Finishing this fight. pic.twitter.com/6Ezq9NUqMq
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 27, 2025
Michael Senters—a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech who studies the political consequences of online culture—sent me a DM out of the blue after he saw the Warthog meme. “The Halo tweets and the reactions on Twitter are actually driving me insane,” Senters told me. This is a man who regularly subjects himself to the depths of 4chan so he can study its effect on politics. He’s a veteran of the worst online spaces the internet has to offer, but the Halo meme got to him.
Trump’s propagandists have used the aesthetics of Star Wars and Studio Ghibli to push their message. They’ve set the Pokémon theme song to footage of ICE raids under the title “Gotta Catch Em All.” They’ve layered fash-wave variations of the MGMT song “Little Dark Age” over footage pulled from arrests. We’ve seen this administration do similar things in the past, so why did the Halo meme feel worse to Senters?
“What makes this debacle with the Halo memes different from other invocations of fandom culture is twofold in my opinion. First is the fact that Microsoft has declined to push back on the use of its biggest IP,” he said. “Combined with Microsoft donating to the White House ballroom project it gives the impression that Microsoft tacitly supports this.”
Microsoft declined to comment on this story.
Other IP holders have fought the administration over memes and won. The DHS video using the Pokémon theme song is still up, Pokémon Company International said it hadn’t given the administration permission to use its song. The band MGMT got DHS to pull the video that used its song.Little Dark Age. Even comedian Theo Von was able to force DHS to take down a video that featured him without his permission. As of this writing, the Halo memes are all still up across the Trump administration’s accounts. A video posted on DHS social media accounts Tuesday played music from the Halo soundtrack over footage of a Border Patrol raid.
“Second, and far worse in my opinion is this reaches a new level of dehumanization of immigrants by referring to them as the Flood, a parasitic alien lifeform in Halo who exist solely to eradicate all other forms of life and are controlled by the Gravemind, a monstrous intelligence that lurks in the shadows,” Senters said. “Immigrants stand in for the Flood while the Gravemind stands in for the Jews, creating a perfect metaphor for the far-right that allows them to target to of their traditional enemies with exterminationist rhetoric and it's not hyperbolic to say it's exterminationist because in Halo the only way to defeat the Flood is to wipe them out entirely, otherwise they will continue to reproduce.”
The Trump administration has long invoked racist imagery, much of it pulled from America’s past, to sell its agenda. But overtly equating immigrants to a ravening horde of monsters from a video game has its closest analogue in Nazi propaganda.
“What is especially surreal is seeing niche memes pressed into the service of the most controversial and violent aspects of President Trump's agenda. A few months ago, it was the ‘Ghiblification’ of the kidnapping and detention of American residents. Now it is a picture of Master Chief and a recruitment pitch to join ICE and ‘Destroy the Flood,’ Emerson T Brooking, the director of strategy at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told 404 Media.
“In many ways, Trump administration officials are trying to use these online motifs to smuggle concepts that would otherwise be too extreme for the American people. Most Americans do not want to ‘destroy’ legal asylum seekers. And referring to this group of people as a ‘flood’ is the sort of thing that was once the domain of white-nationalist manifestos. But tie these things together with an image of Master Chief and a Halo Warthog, and the inconceivable becomes a casual joke,” Brooking said.
Trump’s propagandists are extremely online and tuned to what’s trending on social media. The reason Halo is being used to push violence against immigrants is that Microsoft announced a remake of the original game last week. The bigger news was that, for the first time, the Master Chief would appear on Playstation. In a joke post on X, Gamestop declared this the official end of the console war, a term that refers to the decades long feud between fans of different video game consoles.
The official White House X account retweeted the joke post with an image of Trump as Master Chief. Another White House aligned social media gave Trump credit for ending the console war. Angry Joe, a popular gaming YouTuber, riled up other gamers online by posting “FUCK ICE! And FUCK DONALD TRUMP!” in response to the "Destroy the Flood” meme. The composer of the original games, Marty O’Donnell, reminded everyone that he’s running for Congress and promised to “destroy the flood” if elected. Other people from the original development team told Game File that seeing Master Chief used this way sickened them.
Independent journalist Alyssa Mercante managed to get a response from the White House press team about the Halo memes. “Yet another war ended under President Trump's watch—only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump. That’s why he’s hugely popular with the American people and American Gamers,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai told Mercante in an email.
“It is really not enough to describe the comms teams of the second Trump administration as ‘terminally online.’ The White House just marked the end of the console wars; DHS is posting deep fried Halo memes. We are somewhere else entirely,” Brooking said.
