Guest Opinion: DHS’ racist social media posts beloved by neo-Nazis and other extremists

The Trump administration is 11 months into an authoritarian onslaught against the American public, a major part of which has been the demonization of immigrants and a deportation operation targeting migrants, permanent residents, and even citizens. In a sign of how much far-right hate and xenophobia have become normalized since President Donald Trump returned to office, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation machine, is putting out a series of tweets that have gone viral using white supremacist and fascistic imagery in order to recruit new agents, in what could lead to violence against migrants, LGBTQ+ communities, and other vulnerable communities.

These posts depict Black people trapped in “ crystals ,” references to far-right iconography, gaming, and visual media depicting “fashwave” and “vaporwave,” both of which are common in extremist spaces. But they also carry concerning implications for other communities targeted by the extreme far right, including LGBTQ+ people. The aesthetics and subcultures DHS is echoing – rooted in online neo-Nazi and incel forums – are intertwined with the same digital ecosystems that spread violent anti-LGBTQ hate and harassment.

Extremists have been emboldened by DHS’ posts, with X users responding with Nazi imagery , spurring on ICE to “ start rounding them up ,” and celebrating a post from DHS comparing migrants to mutated aliens deserving of extermination.

One explicitly racist post coming from the DHS X account places eight Black people imprisoned within crystals . The crystals are a reference to Elder Scrolls, a video game in which users can bind souls inside Soul Gems, effectively trapping them inside a crystallized prison .

The imagery was co-opted by far-right extremists in late 2024, especially following the presidential election. The Ohio Proud Boys , for example, posted an apparent AI-generated image showcasing Trump walking past liberals (derogatorily referred to as “libtards”) captioned “all those who doubted Trump.... They say the first 10,000 years in the crystals are the longest. I hope your little Trump doubter post was worth it, pal.” Other groups on Telegram, where extremists often congregate, claimed that Democratic influencers are facing an “ impending crystalization ” and “ we’re putting all the libtards in the crystal, ” the latter post using an AI-generated video of Vice President JD Vance surrounded by crystals, in which Vance is supposedly imprisoning liberals. One year later, the official DHS Twitter account is making the same kind of posts imprisoning Black people in crystals, in a post which has collected over eight million views.

In another galvanizing post that seems like it would only be attractive to extremists, DHS posted a “ fashwave ” video featuring the song “Dark Age” by MGMT, which is commonly featured in fashwave content. Fashwave is a genre of far-right propaganda consisting of electronic music, typically slowed and pitched down, and is associated with transnational far-right and neo-Nazi groups such as Patriot Front, Will2Rise, La Cagoule, Active Clubs, Junge Tat, COMITÉ DU 9 MAI, Gym XIV, and Ouest Casual . The video, after facing a copyright complaint, has been taken down from X. DHS’ identical post on BlueSky is also unavailable. Fascist-friendly users on X responded cheerfully, celebrating “ Dark age edits from federal agencies ” while posting other fashwave edits including Nazi symbolism such as the Sonnenrad . When questioned about the post, a DHS spokesperson responded, “ Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it Nazi propaganda .”

Recruitment posts made by the DHS and ICE have been regularly met with fanfare from far-right and neo-Nazi influencers, including several Proud Boys chapters . A recent post with the words “ send them back ,” referring to migrants, was met with a positive response by “@chaotichermes,” an influencer with over 90,000 followers on X who wears Swastika jewelry . Hermes said, “ I like the propaganda and all but let’s actually start rounding them up ,” to which the DHS official account astonishingly replied, “ Working on it! ” linking to a statement touting their deportation numbers.

 
The DHS has begun posting content on gaming platforms, which have long-been used by far-right extremists to spread propaganda and recruit young people. On October 27, DHS and the White House accounts made a series of recruitment posts featuring imagery from the video game series Halo (owned by Microsoft), including one captioned “Destroy the flood,” which refers to the villains in the Halo series of the same name, a race wiped to near extinction and then mutated into “the flood,” who users kill while playing the game. This directly compares migrants targeted by ICE to mutated killer aliens who need to be exterminated.

According to Forbes, as of October 27, Microsoft has not provided a comment on the use of Halo imagery to dehumanize migrants (Microsoft is also among the several tech companies contributing to the $300 million White House ballroom being constructed by the Trump administration). Jaime Griesemer, one of the chief designers of Halo during its infancy, decried the post, saying , “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 ... I personally find it despicable. The Flood are evil space zombie parasites and are not an allegory to any group of people.”

White nationalists, on the other hand, were overjoyed. Kevin DeAnna (who writes under the name of “James Kirkpatrick”), a reporter for VDARE, a white nationalist outlet also present at the 2024 white supremacist American Renaissance conference , responded to the DHS’ post with “incredible things are happening .” Another X user celebrated the post by saying “ we have our guys sharing mass deportation vaporwave Halo edits ,” with “vaporwave” referring to the fashwave-adjacent style of image commonly used in far-right spaces.

The Halo references made by the DHS not only emboldened the far right to further dehumanize migrants, but also to claim that the racist and misogynistic #GamerGate campaign of the 2010s that targeted female game creators directly led to the White House’s adoption of gaming culture in their messaging. Far-right podcast Human Events host Jack Posobiec said the posts signified “ an unequivocal win for Gamergate .” Kangmin Lee, a former Turning Point USA (TPUSA) ambassador now associated with far-right podcaster Benny Johnson, said “ Gamergate saved America .” The original #GamerGate led to real-world harm , with indie game developer Zoe Quinn and gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian being the first targets. The latter featured in a now-deplatformed video game designed so that players could “beat her up.” It also led to the FBI investigating a marked increase in online harassment, and helped extremists such as neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin build their audiences. Those same networks now drive online anti-LGBTQ+ hate campaigns, particularly against trans people and drag performers, showing the clear continuum between misogynist, racist, and queerphobic extremism.

It is shocking that the DHS knows about, and is actively employing, fascist and racist memes to attract the same misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ+ online subcultures that have been central to radicalization in recent years. DHS is playing footsie with racists and other extremists—effectively signaling that these ideologies are acceptable inside government institutions.

For the LGBTQ+ community, this normalization of extremist iconography by federal agencies is especially dangerous: it echoes the same propaganda narratives that have fueled anti-trans and anti-queer violence both online and in the streets. That puts migrant communities, people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ communities at risk – not only from emboldened hate groups, but from policies shaped by those very ideologies.

Wendy Via and Heidi Beirich co-founded the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, or GPAHE, which tackles the rise of far-right extremism, political violence, and authoritarianism by exposing how hate-driven movements and ideologies have infiltrated mainstream politics and government institutions. This essay is adapted from one posted online.