The White House gamifies cruelty with Rio Run and Tom Homan

By Aoife Gallagher · Reporting from Dublin · September 4, 2026

There is a particular kind of chill that comes from watching a superpower treat the displacement of human beings as a matter of digital entertainment.

# The White House Made a Video Game About Hunting Migrants

There is a particular chill that comes from watching a superpower treat human displacement as digital entertainment. When the White House website hosts "Rio Run"—a retro-style game where players guide a pixelated character representing border czar Tom Homan to hunt down migrants near the Rio Grande—it is not merely a lapse in judgment. It is a calculated attempt to rewrite the moral architecture of the state.

High scores and human wreckage

As reported by G1 Globo and CNA, the Trump administration launched a suite of games designed to turn deportation into leisure. Users play "Build the Wall," a Tetris-inspired puzzle where they stack blocks to form a barrier against a digital horde, alongside a third game involving the collection of nets to fill "Trump Accounts," investment funds for children born in coming years.

This is the deployment of a proven mechanism of statecraft. The U.S. military pioneered this path in the early 2000s with "America's Army," an interactive simulator used to normalize geopolitical objectives and recruit soldiers. The mechanism remains identical: the state gamifies coercive operations to secure public participation and sanitize aggressive policy. By turning the border into a digital playground, the administration makes the machinery of expulsion feel as innocuous as a childhood pastime.

Rebranding cruelty as innovation

The White House offered a defense. In a statement to AFP, officials argued that these games highlight the contrast between a culture of fun and success and the dark socialist vision held by the opposition, adding that the initiative is focused on telling the story of the President’s accomplishments.

It is a seductive argument if politics is merely a struggle of aesthetics. But that proclaimed success rests on a foundation of documented brutality. While the administration speaks of fun, the Department of Homeland Security recorded 51,000 undocumented immigrant arrests in a single month. While they celebrate innovation, Excélsior reports that ICE is moving to purchase thousands of electric-shock gloves to subdue migrants, and half of those detained possess no criminal record.

This mirrors the logic of the 2019 family separation policy: the premise that extreme enforcement serves as a valid tool for deterrence. To call this storytelling is a lie. It is the erasure of personhood. As Amérika García Grewal of the Frontera Federation stated, "They’ve been playing games with people’s lives for years, now they’ve made a video game of what they’re doing."

A legacy of turning people into abstractions

This descent has clear antecedents. The provocative imagery deployed during the 2016 presidential campaign laid the groundwork, transforming the border into a stage for performative strength. It intensified with Operation Lone Star, where border security hardened into a spectacle of containment.

The danger of gamification is that it removes the friction of reality. In a video game, the migrant possesses no name, family, or history; they are merely obstacles to be cleared or blocks to be stacked. When the state adopts this language, it signals to its citizens that the people on the other side of the line are no longer subjects of human rights, but variables in a calculation of power.

A government that seeks to win by turning the suffering of the vulnerable into a high-score competition abandons the concept of a republic. You cannot build a stable civilization on the whims of a digital hunt.

The White House gamifies cruelty with Rio Run and Tom Homan

High scores and human wreckage

Rebranding cruelty as innovation

A legacy of turning people into abstractions

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