Zombies at the border

This essay is Part 2 in a series analyzing the zombie racial Other in media.  

Days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the White House launched Arcade.gov, a suite of 8-bit games appropriating classic computer and arcade pastimes to "tell the story of the President's many accomplishments in a way that resonates with every American." In "Rio Run," which copies the beloved Snake game, the player must "patrol the line along the [Rio Grande] river" and deport immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. "Build the Wall" was a Tetris-style game that has now been removed from the site after Tetris rebuked it as copyright infringement. The game allowed players to "stack bricks [and] hold the line" to "protect the border from the coming horde." 

The horde is, of course, imagined as a "zombie border siege" and players gain points for each deflected zombie. It's ghastly, and it's not the first time Trump has invoked the zombie to underline his political intentions.

In HBO's warring families fantasy epic Game of Thrones (2011–2019), the biggest threat isn't war, but the zombie horde marching on The Wall. The people of Westeros live in fear of a zombie army led by White Walkers intent on slaughtering humans. Zombies are steadily marching to the South, coming to tear down The Wall, a massive barrier made of ice, stone, and magic constructed to protect the Seven Kingdoms. Game of Thrones (GoT), the White Walker zombie army, and The Wall were such huge parts of pop culture that, in 2019, Trump posted a self-referential meme with the text "The Wall is coming," using the show's distinctive typeface and alluding to its iconic phrase, "Winter is coming."

Zombie scholar Florian Krautkrämer argues that, unlike in earlier centuries, zombie narratives of our time "focus more on differences between zombies and humans than on similarities." Contemporary pop culture zombie mythology is "set in the context of migration, racism, and exploitation," and fast zombies—like the rageful, sprinting undead in post-9/11 zombie media such as Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) and Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004)—are viewed "solely as the monstrous Other, which no longer leaves any room for empathy." With his "The Wall is coming" post, Trump openly drew a parallel between the movement of immigrants and GoT's zombie horde advancing on The Wall, intentionally agitating the already-growing anxiety around border control in the U.S. 

The Trump administration's position on immigration has always been transparently cruel. Trump has long made promises to carry out mass deportations, bragged about "get[ting] elected twice over the wall," and made thousands of false claims about immigrants, including warning that immigrant communities of this era are the "largest invasion in the history of our country."

Given the significance of walls as protection barriers in zombie narratives that emphasize security and survival, Trump invoking zombie invasion as a metaphor for immigration is, frankly, low-hanging fruit. It very clearly illuminates the fears of the would-be white ethnostate that a sturdy wall will not be enough to insulate them from the wave of brown-skinned, immigrant terrorists and criminals coming to destroy their way of life. As Krautkrämer says, the pop culture zombie of today is "proof that not even a wall can protect a country from unwanted Others." 

Immigration Simulation 

Lucas Pope's genre-defining indie game Papers, Please was released in 2013. The player assumes the role of an immigration officer at a border checkpoint in the USSR-inspired totalitarian country of Arstotzka in 1982. Locked in conflicts with neighboring territories, Arstotzka uses the heightened political tensions to impose stricter immigration policies. As the immigration officer, you inspect passports and other documentation, earning money for each person correctly processed. But increasing requirements get added to your checklist as in-game events, like attacks on the border, impact the political landscape, and it becomes harder to uncritically follow the orders of Arstotzka's totalitarian regime as the game progresses. Ultimately, the game puts you in a position to choose whether to follow the state's authority or your own morality.

2021's Black Border: Border Simulator Game is a title with the tagline "Everything Terrible Could Happen." Black Border leans heavily on the legacy of Papers, Please, focusing on the various and intensifying verification tasks. In it, you play as an immigration officer for the fictional country of Alanan. The player must "check the passengers' papers and prevent crossing certain individuals such as terrorists, wanted criminals, smugglers, and entrants with forged or stolen documents." Its sequels, Black Border 2 (2025) and Black Border 3 (2026), add X-rays, weigh stations, canine units, and the directive to "strategize to face the unexpected threats of the night."

It's in Contraband Police (2023) where we see a distinct shift in the nature of the border patrol simulator. The game begins with the same document verification as its predecessors, but it soon becomes a hybrid simulator and first-person shooter. While inspecting IDs, cargo lists, and vehicles, the player is pulled into threads like other border officers suspected of treason and shootouts with gangs. And while the in-game authoritarian country has banned teachers, artists, and journalists from crossing the border, the game's focus is less on the moral implications of this authoritarianism and more on policing and hunting people at the border.

Border patrol simulators have been released consistently in recent years, and there are more on the horizon. The list includes, but is not limited to: Border Patrol (2024), Border Patrol Officer: Control Duty Simulator (2024), Border Police: Contraband Simulator 2024 (2024), Border Police: Contraband Simulator 2026 (2025), Borderland Defender (2025), Border Patrol: Checkpoint Duty (2026), Border Patrol Simulator (forthcoming), and Airport Contraband Police (forthcoming).  In these games, players act as agents making quick decisions about who to deny entry, detain, or liquidate, and some allow players to upgrade to submachine guns, sniper rifles, and more advanced weaponry.

The tasks in these simulators often mirror and dramatize the work of the U.S. Border Patrol, which proudly proclaims its mission to maintain "traffic checkpoints along highways leading from border areas, conducting city patrol and transportation check, and anti-smuggling investigations," prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons like "weapons of mass destruction" from crossing the border, and ultimately act as "vigilant protectors of our Nation's borders." 

Disastrous Disease

While the absurd zombie border siege 8-bit game was disturbing, especially coming from the White House, it wasn't the first of its kind, and we'll undoubtedly see more like it in the future. 2025 saw the release of ad-heavy mobile games like Quarantine Simulator Border 3D, Quarantine Zone Border Zombie, and Quarantine Zombie Border Zone. Gameplay in each simulator is essentially the same: monitor the checkpoint and protect the border from people carrying the zombie infection. 

But these are small, relatively unknown games. The standout "best-selling, mega-hit" zombie border crisis simulator came along in early 2026 from Brigada Games. Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, titled Quarantine Zone: Border Zombie Checkpoint on Nintendo Switch, places the player at a military evacuation checkpoint, where the American flag is proudly displayed, to inspect individuals with a scanner for signs of infection and decide who can cross the border following a zombie outbreak. Zombies attack the checkpoint after nightfall, and players operate a weaponized drone to combat the undead onslaught.

Game Rant compared the game to fellow post-apocalyptic zombie experience and Zionist propaganda vehicle, The Last of Us (2013), speculating that "Quarantine Zone: The Last Check could give fans a small taste of what the daily routine of a FEDRA agent could have been like."

FEDRA, the Federal Disaster Response Agency, is the corrupt military faction that polices quarantine zones and checkpoints in The Last of Us video games and HBO series adaptation, enforcing strict curfews and publicly executing insubordinate survivors. FEDRA officers use special scanning tools, similar to the scanner in Quarantine Zone, to detect infected people. Anyone suspected of an infection is killed, even if they aren't showing any symptoms of the Cordyceps brain infection (CBI). News sources at the start of the outbreak reported that Cordyceps originated in South America and was transmitted to the U.S. through contaminated crops. Not long after, the warning about contamination expanded to imports from Central America and Mexico.  

In a 2024 radio interview, Trump declared that immigrants are "coming in as terrorists… and people are coming in with very contagious diseases." Beyond this, he has spread the falsehood that Haitian immigrants eat people's pets and other things "they aren't supposed to be," and (reportedly) said that Haitians should be kept out of the U.S. because they "all have AIDS." He has claimed, on more than one occasion, that illegal immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country." And at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, he routinely referred to the infection as the "kung flu" and the "China virus," worsening already prevalent racism against East Asian immigrant communities.

The way the spread of CBI transpires in The Last of Us parallels the nightmare Trump continually conjures up: disease silently and unknowingly smuggled in from foreign lands, one that threatens the security of the entire nation and, therefore, must be stamped out by any means. The irony of this is staggering, considering that the Trump administration has intentionally dismantled environmental, chemical, and food safety regulations through its Make America Healthy Again initiative, which has directly led to multiple food-borne illness outbreaks in the U.S.: "Cyclospora in leafy greens, E coli in frozen blueberries, salmonella in jalapeños," and more. Despite this, immigrants continue to be the scapegoat. Dr. Johannes Fehrle writes in "'Zombies Don't Recognize Borders': Capitalism, Ecology, and Mobility in the Zombie Outbreak Narrative,"

"the infected bodies of the ones carrying the zombie disease can read as an internalization of the fear of 'invisible' (illegal im)migration, a literalization of fears of migration in the form of non-human others traveling across borders 'concealed' inside their infected hosts, thereby invading zones previously imagined as safe."

The pop culture zombie, especially in the post-COVID era, is deeply symbolic of the spread of infectious disease via viruses, bacteria, or parasites, dispersed through fungal spores or transmitted through bites and bodily fluids. Trump drawing connections between disease, terrorism, and an immigrant siege is a documented pattern, and the "Build the Wall" game featuring a zombie border siege conforms perfectly to that pattern. His obsession with immigrants and disease and his preoccupation with zombies go hand in hand. 

Undocumented Undead

As Fehrle explains, the prevalence of zombies in media is, in no small part, an expression of "concerns with the movement of the 'wrong kind' of people across borders." Inevitably, zombies have also occupied the social consciousness as perpetual avatars for unwanted movement or collectives of unwanted people. In 2023, right-wing influencer Lauren Witzke shared a viral video showing swaths of people climbing a tall fence, claiming it was a scene from the U.S.-Mexico border. She captioned the post with "The Southern border is a dystopian nightmare." France 24 debunked the viral video in a piece titled, "No, the US border does not look like a scene from 'The Walking Dead.'" 

AMC's The Walking Dead (TWD) series adaptation of Robert Kirkman's comic sensation premiered on Halloween 2010. It had such an impactful addition to the zombie zeitgeist that it spawned six spin-offs—Fear the Walking Dead (2015–2023), World Beyond (2020–2021), Tales of the Walking Dead (2022), Dead City (2023–present), Daryl Dixon (2023–present), and The Ones Who Live (2024)—and nearly two dozen video games. 

In "Undocumented Zombies: US-Mexican Immigration, The Walking Dead, and the Effort/Shape of Monsters," late historian Jeffrey Kaplan describes TWD as a "drama series about contagious interlopers who overspill city centers." His chapter examines U.S.-Mexican immigration politics through a movement analysis of TWD's zombies, ultimately arguing that the series depicts its herds of undead as "code for overland Mexican immigration." The apocalyptic conditions in TWD act as a xenophobe's parable, warning of the precarity and foolhardiness of open borders: alien entities and unknown hazards may infiltrate their sanctum.

"At that point, the swarm will spread until resources vanish, and sickening strikes to the heads of the interlopers will be the only, futile, choice left."

Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, explained the television ad placement strategy during the 2016 presidential elections in an interview with Forbes. The campaign targeted specific voter blocs through their viewing habits, using ratings as a data source to best determine where to place pro-Trump ads. "The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration" was one of those targeted ad placements. Zombie contagion emerges, time and again, as an expedient symbol of a deadly, uncontrollable wave of foreign invaders. 

It's no coincidence that border patrol games are currently flourishing, nor is it arbitrary that zombies are being incorporated. It's not insignificant that the simulators of this border patrol simulator boom amplify and sensationalize the policing of the border, nor is it surprising that the Trump administration created its own zombie border siege game as a blatant amusement of border violence. 

The steady rise in the popularity of games about protecting borders from impending threats occurring alongside increasingly cruel immigration policies—as well as the abject brutality of ICE and the horrors reported from inside immigrant detention centers—is indicative of the power of entertainment media, and it should not be left unexamined.