Like ‘The Hunger Games,’ But for Immigrants
The Trump administration thinks Americans want their cruel, warped vision of immigration to come to TV.
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY might make a reality-TV show. According to the Wall Street Journal, the department is interested in a proposal it was pitched for a program, The American, in which participants would fight, compete, and complete challenges for the right to become a U.S. citizen.
“This isn’t The Hunger Games for immigrants,” the show’s producer insisted.
These denials came at roughly the same time as a spokesman for DHS was insisting that ICE agents are absolutely nothing like the Gestapo.
When you have to tell people that you’re not trying to pit immigrants against one another in a dystopian gameshow and that you’re not the Gestapo, it might be time to think about your life choices. Then again: maybe not. Because the most interesting question about The American is whether the Trump administration wants people to think of it as the Hunger Games.
Rob Worsoff is the Canadian producer behind A&E’s Duck Dynasty and Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker, and he’s also the frontman for The American. He says the show will celebrate what it means to be American, from traveling on a boat to Ellis Island to “cultural” contests like logrolling in Wisconsin and assembling a Ford Model T in Detroit, before the finale: a naturalization ceremony for the winner at the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s not some meanspirited thing that’s trying to deport people, it’s exactly the opposite of that,” he said. “We’re going to put a face to all these people who are on this journey and want nothing more than to be a part of this country, and we’re going to humanize them, and we’re going to celebrate them,” he told NewsNation.
Let’s give Worsoff the benefit of the doubt and assume that he doesn’t view the idea as “meanspirited.” Is it possible that his humanizing, immigrant-celebrating vision for the show is one the Trump administration would share?
That seems unlikely.
Donald Trump is leading a mass-deportation effort that is purposefully cruel. At every turn, this administration has chosen to forgo normal bureaucratic methods of operation in favor of maximal confrontation and the use of as much physical force as the law will countenance. Homeland Security could have informed Rümeysa Öztürk that her visa had been revoked by mail and instructed her to leave the country within ten days. Instead, they pulled her visa in secret and then sent masked undercover agents to snatch her off the street. As the saying goes: The cruelty is the whole point.
Then there’s the way members of the administration talk about immigrants. Last year, Trump pitched that “nasty” and “mean” migrants should have their own UFC fighting league. ICE Director Todd Lyons said in April that he would like to run deportations like “Amazon Prime for human beings.” The White House released inhumane videos of men sent to Guantánamo Bay and to an El Salvador black site (many of whom, we would later learn, did not have criminal records); soaring drone shots gave a sense of military-operational scale before closeups offered the sight of a gay hairdresser crying for his mother as he was roughly shaved by Salvadoran agents. The administration posted an “ASMR” video of men in shackles to an official White House account.
It’s hard to imagine the same administration responsible for all of the above would want to contribute to a “celebration” of immigrants. And even if they do agree to give access to the production, the gulf between the gilded, made-for-TV version of a contemporary immigrant’s personal story and the violence that person is facing in American neighborhoods makes it very difficult to accept the idea that such a project could yield anything true or worthwhile.
Yet at least one congressional Democrat didn’t rule out the possibility that the show could make it to air. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Cal.) told me this “offensive proposal” is “yet another outrageous idea from an unserious administration.”
”This administration has no serious vision or plan to modernize our immigration system, so they resort to publicity stunts and photo ops that waste taxpayer dollars.”
Cristina Constantini, an Emmy-award-winning director, told me there are “a million shows” pitched that never get made. She went on to suggest that the goal of the pitch for The American was never to actually bring a show to air, but to create “a press circus.”
Mission accomplished. But what if there’s more to it than that, even?
No false equivalence. No sane-washing. No fake “both sides.”
Just real reporting and saying the true things, out loud.
Before she was a filmmaker, Constantini was a reporter who covered immigration and abuse in detention centers. “For anyone who really understands the stakes for immigrant citizenship, anyone who has met a refugee or has met an immigrant, it would change their lives,” she said. “So this idea completely lacks the seriousness with which a government should treat this great blessing that is American citizenship.”
So why would the Trump administration do it? Jim Acosta notes videos of men shaved bald and standing in their underwear at the CECOT prison in El Salvador evoke something out of Germany in the 1930s or 1940s. “Turning desperate migrants into contestants in a grotesque dystopian reality show only magnifies the Trump administration’s cruel impulses,” he told me. “There is only one word for this idea. It is evil.”
The Daily Mail, which broke the story about the pitch, confirmed in its initial reporting that a DHS spokesperson and Noem herself loved the idea of The American, and Noem had put her support behind the pitch. In a Senate hearing yesterday, though, Noem claimed that “we have no knowledge of a reality show” and that she personally “did not know anything about this reality show until the reporter reached out.”
LAST MONTH TOM HOMAN, Trump’s border czar, said that sending immigrants to Guantánamo was the “most exciting day of my life.” What if that’s really true? Could it be that the Trump administration floated Migrant Hunger Games not just as a distraction, but because it thinks people will love the idea the way they do?
Colin Rogero is a Democratic ad maker who worked for both the Kamala Harris 2024 campaign and Ruben Gallego’s Senate campaign. He also comes from a working-class background in South Florida, where a football scholarship allowed him to go to college and become a filmmaker and producer before venturing into politics. In my experience as a reporter, he’s a straight shooter (filmmaking pun intended)—and I’ve never heard him as mad on a phone call as when I asked him about The American and the people who work for Trump.
“They believe in lies, racism, and the pursuit of ratings,” Rogero told me. (For what it’s worth, he thought the show sounded more like The Running Man than Hunger Games.)
“They’re systematically trying to dehumanize an entire ethnic group of people in this country and it’s beyond disgusting—it’s also dangerous,” Rogero said. He cited a spike in hate crimes during Trump’s first term, which included the awful El Paso Walmart shooting in which a white gunman drove ten hours to kill Mexicans and Latinos, fearing a “Hispanic invasion.”
And yet Rogero is optimistic.
“The American people are overworked, stressed out, looking for ways to improve their economic realities, but they’re not stupid,” Rogero told me. “You can run a reality show when you’re making promises before the election, you can even run a reality-show government with made-for-TV appointees, but when you’re running the government into the ground and looking for scapegoats, the American people know it.”
One Last Thing
A major development in immigration news Monday night as Alina Habba, U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, announced charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), claiming she “assaulted, impeded, and interfered” with law enforcement at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in the state. McIver responded by saying lawmakers were there lawfully to conduct oversight, calling the charges “purely political” and meant to “criminalize and deter legislative oversight.”
As Democrats said after the incident, video appears to show that McIver is the one who was assaulted. If this strikes you as a chilling instance of the Trump administration trying to stamp out dissent, well, many of us agree. Sam Stein and I broke it down in a Monday-night video before Democratic leadership announced they would respond strongly, with some calling the charges a step over a red line.
Is it worth it? Let me work it. I put my Marx down flip it and reverse it.
BILLIONAIRE HUNGER GAMES!
We drop the ten wealthiest men in the middle of nowhere with death traps around every corner, no food, no help, no shelter. They have to survive purely on their own will, tenacity, and drive.... I can't even complete the sentence without laughing.
Only one gets to keep their wealth at the end.
This is one of the most grotesque ideas even in this grotesque universe. Instead of the Hunger Games, I thought of the Gladiator. The hateful people of this country would probably enjoy it. That includes the millions non-white naturalized Americans who think they are better than the undocumented. I want to break it to them that they are only luckier, not better.