“Trump Turns Hunting People Into a Video Game”

On the White House’s new website, a figure in a suit glides across the screen and collects people. The controls follow that old arcade game where a snake gets longer the more it swallows. Behind the man in the tie, a chain of figures in orange jumpsuits keeps growing, while quick fingers drive the score higher. A game like this asks nothing from the player but speed and, in return, strips away any sense of the weight of what those fingers are doing.

The thing is called Rio Run. According to consistent reports, the player controls a digital version of border czar Tom Homan moving along the Rio Grande and picking up migrants of different skin colors. The instruction tells the player to work the line and remove every border crosser from the field until the deportation number adds up. The image recalls footage of people in chains boarding planes bound for foreign countries.

There are more titles alongside it. In a block-stacking game modeled on Tetris, players are supposed to pile up bricks to protect the border from an approaching horde, announced as a border zombie siege. Another game asks players to catch cash and gold with a net and pour it into so-called Trump Accounts, those investment accounts into which the government deposits $1,000 for eligible children. Another has players sort school lunches correctly so America can become healthy again. The collection was promoted with a video whose lettering imitates the branding of the Japanese game company Sega.

The accompanying line was brief: “CAN’T STOP WINNING. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account.” Asked about it, the White House said it was fully focused on telling the story of the president’s many successes in a way that reached every American. The site, it said, pits a culture of fun and winning against the dark socialist vision it attributes to Democrats. Offering its own policies as entertainment shows just how easily they come to the people behind them.

The White House has long treated its online presence as a political weapon, using provocative videos and references meant to fire up its own supporters and anger the other side. The arcade takes the same method one step further. For the administration, the advertising is what matters, while those helping people at the border are left with the degradation of living human beings.

At the border, it sounds different. “It makes me sick,” said Amerika Garcia Grewal, co-director of the Frontera Federation in Eagle Pass, Texas. People’s lives have been treated like a game for years, she said, and now they have literally turned it into a video game. The people behind it, she said, have lost any sense of what it means to be human and to care about other people. Adriana Jasso, coordinator of AMIGOS San Diego Community, who works at the border herself, spoke of a lack of seriousness in the administration. The cruelty no longer surprises anyone. Something that is not a game is being presented as one here, while people in detention centers are in serious danger.

A score is the oldest disguise for a body count. It turns what matters into nothing more than a number, and the highest number rewards the most thorough refusal to look. That is how something no one wants to watch can be carried out once it takes the form of after-work entertainment.

Behind the score is a reality that is harder to click away. Our reporting shows more people being held in immigration detention than ever before, from around 40,000 when Trump took office to more than 60,000 by late 2025. Planning goes beyond that, to well over 100,000. Nearly 75 percent of those detained have no criminal conviction, and the vast majority are held in privately run facilities whose operators make money for every day someone remains locked up. Not one of these detainees appears as a number on a screen. Every one of them is waiting in a cell that cannot be clicked away. On average, a detainee remains locked up for 44 days, and every day costs $152. The budget for all of this exceeds $14 billion. For every person released, according to figures from November 2025, more than 14 are deported straight out of custody.

In court, the winning record looks thin. Eight federal appeals courts have ruled the underlying mandatory detention policy unlawful. The White House is celebrating a score no court recognizes.