US government uses Halo images in a call to 'destroy' immigration, Microsoft declines to comment

Just a few days after the surprise announcement of Halo: Campaign Evolved, the US government has co-opted imagery from the game to promote its efforts to deport millions of people from the country. The post continues a pattern by the Trump administration of co-opting copyrighted material without permission for use as propaganda.

It began last Saturday on X with a sort of faux diplomatic communique from GameStop declaring the end of the console wars, brought about by the announcement that the Halo remake is headed to the PlayStation 5. In response, the White House—yes, the actual, real White House, seat of power of the world's last remaining superpower—posted an AI-generated image of US president Donald Trump as Master Chief, presumably a play on Trump's inaccurate but persistent claim that he has now ended eight wars in just eight months.

It's ridiculous and embarrassing, yes, and sadly symptomatic of how far the US has fallen, but really no worse than anything else that's come out of the White House social media account—like, for instance, referring to Trump as the "Dealmaker-in-Chief" as the global economy is roiled by his incessant, capricious trade wars.

What followed was much worse, however. Several hours after the White House post, the Department of Homeland Security put up its own Halo image with the message "Destroy the Flood," and a link to the ICE recruitment page.

Where the Trump-as-Master Chief post is merely cringeworthy, the Homeland Security message is flat-out dangerous. Comparing immigrants in the US to a parasitic alien life form that infects and annihilates advanced societies is not deeply offensive, it's also rooted in the worst of human history: As seen in the untermenschen of the Holocaust and "cockroaches" in Rwanda, to name a couple recent examples, dehumanizing the "other" so you can more easily inflict cruelty, injustice, and horrors upon them is hardly a new technique, and the US government's messaging was not subtle.

You might think that using imagery from one of its best known videogames in a call to "destroy" immigrants would prompt Microsoft to action, or at least to express some small modicum of disapproval. For now, at least, you would be wrong: Rather like Nintendo, which eagerly picks copyright fights it knows it can win but kept its mouth tightly zipped when Homeland Security used Pokémon to promote violent immigration raids, a representative told PC Gamer that "Microsoft does not have anything to share on this matter."

Discussion of the posts have also been forbidden in the Halo Discord, but the fan-operated Halo subreddit has taken a different tack: A message posted by the mod team says that while the usual policy is "to remove politics and AI slop," there's clearly a desire to discuss these messages and so it's being allowed.

"God I’m so tired of the White House acting like an edgy 17 year old," writes one of the most upvoted comments in the thread. "This is 'the police using The Punisher logo' levels of media illiteracy," comments another.

Comment from r/halo

GameStop, apparently comfortable spreading the US government's anti-immigrant propaganda, retweeted the White House tweet with another image of Trump dressed as Master Chief, with the fat-faced JD Vance meme in the background as Cortana. What does it mean? I can't even begin to guess at this point—I can only force you to look at it, as I had to