Washington, D.C. — The Department of Homeland Security has deleted an AI-generated immigration enforcement post that depicted a turbaned Sikh man as a dangerous driver, after Sikh and Hindu advocacy groups accused the agency of using a racial stereotype.
The image, posted Wednesday on DHS’s official X account, showed a robot resembling Optimus Prime confronting a bearded man identified as “Mr. Singh.” The graphic told him to “self-deport or find out” and said he did not know how to drive. The surname Singh is widely used among Sikh men and is also common among Indian communities more broadly.
DHS said the image referred specifically to Harjinder Singh, an Indian truck driver charged in a fatal Florida crash that killed three people. Singh has pleaded not guilty to vehicular homicide and manslaughter charges.
The Sikh Coalition said the post amounted to profiling an entire community, noting that millions of people share the surname Singh. The Hindu American Foundation also condemned the graphic as “racist” and “anti-Indian.”
DHS rejected the criticism before deleting the post, calling the backlash “faux outrage.” The department has been running a broader campaign focused on undocumented commercial drivers and recently created a tip line for reporting suspected immigration violations involving truckers.
The controversy also extended to the Transformers imagery itself. Hasbro said the government had not received permission to use the likeness of its characters and emphasized that Optimus Prime is intended to represent leadership, compassion and justice.
The deleted post is the latest example of the administration’s aggressive use of AI-generated pop-culture imagery in official immigration messaging, a strategy that has repeatedly drawn criticism over tone, accuracy and stereotyping.
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