Hasbro says the Optimus Prime images circulating in Department of Homeland Security posts were made without its permission. The toy company put out a statement Thursday on its official Instagram account describing Optimus Prime as a beloved character who represents humility, leadership, compassion and justice, saying it was aware of the recent posts using his likeness, and that those posts were done without permission and do not represent the Transformers brand or Hasbro.
Hasbro never named DHS. The statement came one day after the department posted the images.
On September 9, DHS published AI generated Transformers themed content on X. One was a fake movie poster titled “Transformers: Age of Deportation,” a play on the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction, showing the red and blue Autobot leader carrying DHS insignia with ICE across his truck cab chest. It ran alongside a post about commercial driver’s licenses, in which the department argued that people in the country illegally should not be operating commercial vehicles and encouraged the public to report suspected immigration violations.
The second image showed an Optimus Prime styled figure in immigration enforcement markings confronting a brown skinned, bearded man identified as “Mr Singh,” with the lines “Self-deport or find out” and “America for Americans,” plus a message telling the man to get off American roads.
The Hindu American Foundation and the Sikh Coalition both objected. Singh is one of the most common surnames among Sikhs, carried by millions of people, and pairing it with a caricature of a South Asian driver reads as targeting a religious and ethnic community rather than making a policy argument.
Transformers fans raised a different problem. The Autobots are extraterrestrials. They came to Earth from Cybertron after their home world was destroyed by war, which makes Optimus Prime a refugee who arrived somewhere he was not from and had to be taken in. The line most associated with him is that freedom is the right of all sentient beings.
There is also the matter of when this happened. Peter Cullen, who voiced Optimus Prime from the original 1984 series through the live action films and video games, died August 26 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85. The DHS posts went up eleven days later.
Cullen built the voice on his older brother Larry, a decorated Marine who served in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968. He said his brother came home quieter, that he watched him and listened to him, and that when the audition for a heroic character came along the voice simply came out of him. He described what he was going for as calmness with gentility and strength and honor and dignity underneath it, qualities he associated with the Marines.
His family’s statement after his death asked people to honor his legacy by serving their communities and leading others with compassion, integrity and loyalty, and to always remember, be strong enough to be gentle.
Hasbro has not said whether it intends to pursue anything beyond the statement, and DHS has not responded to it.
