With its 2001 release, Microsoft’s runaway hit Halo: Combat Evolved disrupted the gaming industry.
Now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears to be using Halo to disrupt the lives of immigrants.
In late October, ICE shared recruiting ads online featuring memes from the game. One shows Halo‘s protagonist, Master Chief, driving a combat vehicle and features an iconic quote while the bottom of the post is captioned, “Destroy the Flood. Join.ICE.gov.”
In the game series, Master Chief is an enhanced super soldier from the year 2552, who fights a horde of parasitic zombies. The parasites, called the Flood, take over living hosts’ bodies, turning them into mutated zombie combatants.
Both immigration advocates and gamers have noticed the ads and say they’re alarmed by ICE’s willingness to liken immigrants to a zombie horde that must be violently expunged.
Gamer Nathan Anderson, 19, a student at San Antonio College, says he’s concerned about the signal the messages send.
“Targeting young men who don’t understand the world with video games is smart, but I absolutely despise it for that exact reason as well,” Anderson said. “It’s predatory.”
The controversy comes as President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security looks to hire more than 10,000 ICE agents by the end of the year, which would make it the federal government’s largest law enforcement agency.
Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of immigration reform group America’s Voice, said dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants has already spurred violent acts such as 2019’s mass shooting in an El Paso Walmart, which left 23 dead. The shooter in that incident posted a racist screed saying his attack was an effort to stop a Latino “invasion.”
Cárdenas worries that ICE’s video game-themed advertising signals the agency is willing to recruit bad actors who desire to carry a badge so they can wield dangerous power.
“This kind of rhetoric encourages real-world violence,” she said during a recent call with members of the media. “I mean, we saw that in the El Paso shooting, in so many shootings in the past few years, where people are using this narrative where they’re afraid of immigrants, because immigrants are ‘invading’ our country.”
During that same call, Deborah Fleischaker — former acting ICE chief of staff — said the agency’s recent recruiting ads, which also include propaganda-style online graphics urging potential recruits to “defend the homeland,” raise the specter that the agency will recruit white supremacists looking to carry out violence.
“White supremacist imagery doesn’t really have any place in our personnel hiring decisions, and so it’s very troubling to me,” she added.
In an interview with Game File, Jaime Griesemer, a former chief designer of the Halo series, called out ICE for its use of imagery from the game, which he said draws an offensive parallel.
“Using Halo imagery in a call to ‘destroy’ people because of their immigration status goes way too far, and ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation,” Griesemer said. “I personally find it despicable. The Flood are evil space zombie parasites and are not an allegory to any group of people.“
Editor-in-chief Sanford Nowlin contributed to this report.
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