By: Ricardo Abud
In an era where political reality seems to surpass the most dystopian fiction, the White House has found a particularly disturbing metaphor to describe its immigration operations: the Pokémon video game.
The children's slogan "catch them all" has been transformed into a declaration of immigration policy that reduces human beings to mere fictional creatures to be captured and collected.
This analogy reveals something deeply disturbing about how political power can dehumanize the most vulnerable populations. By equating migrants with characters in a game, their humanity, their individual stories, their fears, and their hopes are deliberately erased. They are no longer María, the mother who crossed the border fleeing domestic violence, nor are they Carlos, the teenager who arrived as a child and considers the United States his only home. They become targets of a gamified hunt where success is measured in deportation numbers, not in shattered lives.
The choice of Pokémon as a metaphor is neither casual nor innocent. This game, designed for children, is based on capturing creatures to train and compete. The fundamental premise is that these creatures, although possessing a certain autonomy, exist to be mastered by a human trainer. Applying this logic to immigration policy suggests a worldview where certain human groups are inherently inferior, objects to be hunted, captured, and controlled by those in positions of power.
This playful rhetoric masks a brutal reality. Behind every "capture" is a family torn apart, a dream cut short, a life violently uprooted. The mother arrested while taking her child to school isn't a Pikachu simply returning to its Poké Ball. It's a person whose absence will leave an irreparable void in the lives of their loved ones, whose deportation may mean returning to life-threatening conditions.
Language matters, especially when it comes from the highest echelons of power. By adopting video game terminology to describe policies that affect millions of lives, cruelty is normalized and people are emotionally distanced from the real suffering these policies cause. A narrative is created where compassion is transformed into weakness and basic humanity into political naiveté.
This systematic desensitization has consequences that go beyond immigration policy. When a society allows its leaders to speak of human beings as game objects, it erodes the moral foundations that sustain democracy and human rights. A dangerous precedent is set where dehumanization becomes a legitimate political tool.
The irony is bitter when we consider that the United States has historically been seen as a land of opportunity, a place where dreams can come true. Now, those same dreams are treated as elements in a game where "catch 'em all" has become the motto of an administration that seems to have forgotten that governing means serving humanity, not hunting it down.
Every person who crosses the border carries with them a unique story of survival, hope, and determination. Reducing these complex narratives to a simple video game slogan is not only cruel, but represents a moral abdication of leadership. It turns human suffering into spectacle, despair into entertainment.
In this context, resistance is not only political but profoundly moral. Every voice raised to remind us that behind the statistics are real people, every act of solidarity with migrant communities, every effort to humanize the migration debate becomes an act of resistance against this cruel gamification of human life.
Human rights organizations, activists, concerned citizens, and the migrants themselves who share their testimonies are waging an essential battle: the battle to preserve humanity in public discourse. Every personal story told, every face shown, every name spoken is an act of defiance against the machinery of dehumanization.
History will harshly judge this moment when political power chose children's entertainment as a model for policies that affect the most vulnerable in our society. Future generations will study this period as an example of how democracies can morally degrade, how language can turn into violence, how cruelty can be normalized through seemingly innocent metaphors.
Because at the end of the day, when the consoles are turned off and the games are put away, separated families will still be searching for each other, broken dreams will still hurt, and the humanity that was attempted to be erased with playful metaphors will continue to claim its place at the center of any society that claims to be just.
The real game at hand isn't about capturing fictional creatures. It's about whether we will choose to preserve our collective humanity or allow it to be sacrificed on the altar of a politics that has forgotten that governing is, above all, an act of service to human dignity.
This article reflects on the use of dehumanizing metaphors in contemporary political discourse and its impact on the most vulnerable communities in our society.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EXCLUSIVE THAN BEING POOR.
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