When a Department of Homeland Security social post set a montage of arrests to the unmistakable opening bars of the Pokémon theme, the internet did what it always does: it erupted. The clip – titled with a wink to the franchise’s merchandising earworm, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” – splices real footage of handcuffed people and officers with bright, cutaway segments from the animated Pokémon series, including shots of Ash Ketchum. 
The contrast is jarring: childhood nostalgia layered over enforcement actions that carry very real human costs.
The reaction was immediate and messy. Some users demanded that The Pokémon Company or Nintendo sue the federal agency for unauthorized use of copyrighted material. Others saw the montage as an obscene trivialization of detention and deportation, a meme weaponized to drum up political support for aggressive immigration enforcement. In the middle of the noise, a notable voice from inside the franchise – its longtime former chief legal officer – offered a contrarian take: litigation is unlikely and, for several pragmatic reasons, probably not advisable.
From a legal standpoint the situation sits at the intersection of copyright, fair use, and sovereign immunity. Copyright owners generally have clear remedies against private parties who appropriate their material, but when the defendant is a U.S. federal agency the calculus changes. Government entities can invoke doctrines – like sovereign immunity or First Amendment defenses in official communications – that complicate straightforward copyright takedowns. Beyond doctrine, there are practical diplomatic and reputational calculations: a multinational entertainment brand suing the U.S. government carries geopolitical and commercial risk, however remote.
But legalities don’t tell the whole story. The former in-house lawyer’s public shrug also points to the company’s culture: The Pokémon Company is famously cautious about publicity and litigation optics. For a business that tightly curates its brand image, engaging in a high-profile dispute with a government agency could draw attention it prefers to avoid. A copyright complaint directed at the social post itself – asking the platform to remove the content – would be a lower-heat alternative, and examples exist where musicians have used copyright reports to take down government videos that sampled their tracks.
Still, the moral dimension of the controversy is unavoidable. For many, the image of migrants and detainees edited into a playful pop-cultural meme is grotesque. It invites a conversation about how visual language – memes, jingles, TV characters – can normalize or sanitize practices that community advocates call harmful. Critics argue that turning human detention into a brandable, shareable punchline erodes empathy and reframes complex policy debates into an online gag.
At the same time, a different chorus treated the post as satire or harmless trolling – an instance of modern political theater where outrage is part of the point. Some commenters celebrated the mash-up as clever messaging; others warned that the government’s adoption of pop-culture tactics shows how quickly entertainment tropes are co-opted for persuasion. Either way, the episode illuminates a new battleground: intellectual property rights are now front and center in civic debates and culture wars.
What happens next is uncertain. The Pokémon Company could quietly request removal through platform channels or pursue no action and let the viral moment fade. Either path sends a signal: refusal to act may be read as tolerating the appropriation of the brand for political ends; an aggressive legal fight could provoke counter-claims and raise diplomatic eyebrows.
Beyond corporate strategy, the larger takeaway is social: who gets to borrow whose symbols, and at what cost? Popular culture icons amplify messages – good and bad – and when institutions of power borrow those icons, the stakes rise. The controversy forces a reckoning about the ethics of public messaging, the limits of satire in government communications, and the practical limits of copyright when public agencies adopt internet-native tactics. For now, the debate continues online, but the deeper questions – about human dignity, brand control, and the mash-up politics of the meme era – deserve a more sustained conversation than a single viral clip can contain.
2 comments
Lol the internet keeps getting weirder. Next they’ll use SpongeBob to sell traffic tickets 😂
Suing would be wild but imagine the backlash – foreign company vs US agency. can see both sides rn