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is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
After using the original Pokémon theme song in a montage of ICE raids, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is using another popular video game franchise to promote itself on social media: Halo. This morning, the DHS posted an image featuring Halo characters, a Warthog vehicle from the games, and the text “DESTROY THE FLOOD” and a link to ICE’s recruitment website. The DHS captioned the post, “finishing this fight.”
Like with its Pokémon-themed post, which was captioned, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All,” the DHS’s Halo post implicitly compares immigrants to creatures from video games — this time, the parasitic alien species called the Flood.
The DHS’s post was the culmination of a social media exchange between the Trump administration and video game retailer GameStop, based on a joke that Trump had overseen the end of the “console wars” thanks to the announcement of the Halo: Combat Evolved remake for PlayStation next year. GameStop, whose CEO and chairman Ryan Cohen has been a vocal supporter of Trump, quoted the joke with a picture of Trump shaking hands with Halo protagonist Master Chief. The White House followed up with an image of Trump in a suit of armor similar to Master Chief’s, and GameStop responded with its own photoshopped Master Chief Trump, adding a meme-ified version of Vice President JD Vance’s head swapped onto what looks to be the feminine anthropomorphic AI Cortana.
Microsoft declined to comment about the DHS’s post, and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the White House’s and GameStop’s posts. The Pokémon Company International, in response to Pokémon being associated with Trump’s mass deportation campaign, previously said in a statement to The Daily Beast that “our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content, and permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property.”
Correction, October 27th: The Pokémon Company International provided the statement to The Daily Beast, not Nintendo, as we originally stated.
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