Over the past year, Karla Reyes and her team at Anima Interactive have visited the US-Mexico border twice to interview migrants and humanitarians. Once a month, Reyes interviews migrants remotely via video calls. She’s spoken to dozens. They come from Latin America, but also South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, each with a shared goal: to cross into the US in search of safety.
In January, hours after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, thousands of migrants suddenly received notice that their appointments with US Customs and Border Protection—the agency that would help them gain asylum—had been canceled. The administration shut down the CBP One app that allows migrants to apply for asylum. It was the first of many roadblocks the new administration would erect in front of those seeking to immigrate to America.
“At a moment’s notice, the course of their lives has been altered again,” Reyes says. “These are people who have been waiting as long as years.”
For Reyes, it only reinforced the sense of urgency around her team’s current project: a game called Take Us North about migrants making the journey across the border. “Even though the game isn’t released yet, we are thinking critically about how we can still continue to share information, tackle disinformation, and share resources with our community,” she says.
One of the biggest misconceptions about migrants, Reyes says—one she hopes the game will help correct—is the story of why they leave their homes for the US. “The general public often gets this narrative that migrants are mostly trying to come to the US purely for economic opportunity,” she says. “The reality is that the majority of the migrants that I’ve interviewed do not want to leave their homes. Most of them are fleeing persecution and violence. They’re leaving behind everything that they love, but they don’t have another choice.”
Anima plans to release Take Us North in late 2026 or early 2027, at which point the circumstances migrants face could be even more stark than the ones they’re confronted with now.
In late February, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that “in a single month under President Trump more than 20,000 illegal aliens were arrested.” More arrests are sure to come as the administration attempts to ramp up deportations. According to a recent Washington Post report, more than 1 million migrants admitted to the US during President Joe Biden’s tenure could face an expedited removal. Migrants who have been arrested in the US face increasingly dangerous conditions aside from just deportation, including imprisonment at the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. An asylum seeker’s journey is never easy, but in 2025 it’s an increasingly frightening prospect.
Take Us North—a narrative-driven, adventure-survival game about migrants traveling through the Sonoran desert—is attempting to both foster empathy and raise awareness about “issues that are unfortunately often reduced in mainstream media to statistics or divisive rhetoric,” Reyes says. Many migrants do not want to leave their homes, but are forced to, whether it’s because of violence, persecution, or extreme poverty. Others, Reyes says, have been kidnapped and are unable to return home. “These are innocent and honest people who have just been in unfortunate circumstances,” she says.
