Sports! Sports sports sports sports sports! Is there any part of American life and culture that the Trump administration can’t hurt with its pettiness and malevolence? When it comes to pettiness and malevolence, MAGA holds all the gold medals!
On Thursday, officers from some unidentified agency under the Department of Homeland Security decided to fuck with baseball, the sport so often described as being as American as apple pie. (For our money, football is actually the most American sport: It’s loud, it’s violent, it’s garish, and it consists of oversized alpha males beating the living shit out of each other at high speeds. But we digress.)
Specifically, DHS decided to fuck with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a civic institution in the city that the Trump administration keeps lying about the state of in order to justify a harsh law-and-order crackdown on undocumented immigrants and some documented immigrants and some US citizens just for a treat.
ICE Whines Its Masked Goon Squad Are Pitiful Victims
This crackdown has involved sending unmarked vehicles full of masked assholes to scoop up any vaguely Hispanic-looking person and shuttling them off to be deported to whatever country Stephen Miller threw a dart into on a map that morning. Which is where the intersection with the Dodgers came in.
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ fan base is reportedly more than 40 percent Latino. So the team has been getting heat for not taking a public stand against the Gestapo tactics being unleashed by the federal government on the city’s Latino population.
Some fans have been calling for a boycott of the team. A Latina singer named Nezza defied the team’s wishes and sang the national anthem in Spanish instead of English before a game a few days ago, and Fox News started lighting up like a pinball machine.
And one Dodger of Latino heritage, Kike Hernandez (that’s pronounced Kee-kay, not like the anti-Jewish slur that shares its spelling), made a video decrying the government crackdown in the city. Then on Wednesday the team announced some sort of initiative (details were still pending) to help communities around LA that had been impacted by ICE raids.
So the Dodgers were pinging hard on ICE’s radar. And in what we are sure is just a huge coincidence, on Thursday morning several unmarked SUVs and vans carrying masked agents tried to enter the giant parking lot at Dodger Stadium for reasons that remain unclear. Perhaps they wanted to use it as a staging area for raids on nearby businesses. Perhaps the agents wanted to pick up any Hispanic-looking fans or Dodgers employees showing up for the game that evening.
There was also a report that the agents were seeking a large space away from the public to process a number of day laborers they had just scooped up in a raid on the parking lot of a Home Depot in Hollywood. For geographic reasons, this is somewhat nonsensical. Dodger Stadium isn’t really a convenient place to get to, and if you are driving in that direction from Hollywood, you may as well drive the additional 10 minutes to the federal building downtown and process all your detainees there, where you will presumably be protected by the National Guard and Marines that have been dispatched to stand around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses so that Donald Trump can feel something stirring in his dusty loins.
Please tune in for more SoCal driving advice for America’s immigration Nazis on the next episode of “The Californians.”
Whatever the reason, Dodger security and nearby LAPD units would not let the agents drive into the parking lot. After a bit of a standoff, the agents left, chased by boos and shouts from local activists who had hurried to the stadium when they heard what was going on. And if you know the history of how the Dodgers and the city of Los Angeles conspired to seize and clear the land on which the stadium was built back in the late 1950s, you will understand that there are several layers of irony here. Also why people might feel the Dodgers owe their Latino fans one. (For a pretty good explainer, check out this one at LAist.)
What’s funny is that various government agencies spent the rest of Thursday trying to pass the buck on exactly whose gaiter-sporting NKVD agents had tried to gain access to the stadium parking lot. The Dodgers and the LAPD claimed the agents were ICE. Then DHS claimed that no, those were CBP agents, and they were just there for unknown reasons:
So the CBP agents just what, drove up to the empty baseball stadium on a Thursday morning to hang out because they liked its vibes? They were taking a masturbation break?
Or maybe they were trying to be intimidating. As we said, the Dodgers had just announced initiatives to help DHS targets. Unless you believe in coincidences, which in this case we very much do not.
Baseball wasn’t the only sport, and the Dodgers weren’t the only team, getting rear-ended by the Trumpified DHS on Thursday. The nation of Senegal announced that five members of its women’s basketball team, along with several staffers, had been denied visas to come to the US to prepare for a tournament. And no one seems to have any idea why. The US didn’t give a reason, and the State Department told CNN that it can’t comment on individual cases.
We’re sure it has nothing to do with Senegal being one of three dozen countries Trump is allegedly thinking about slapping with a travel ban. No, knowing the Trump administration, there is probably a reasonable explanation that can be summed up this way: Women? BLACK women? On a team with no white women? Playing in a basketball tournament for women? Sounds like DEI to us!
On Facebook, Senegal’s prime minister announced the training camp, which was only going to last for 10 days, would relocate to Dakar, among other statements:
“I would like to express my deep gratitude to the People’s Republic of China, which has awarded several dozens of preparation scholarships to our athletes and their coaches, in the perspective of the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games.
“We clearly and firmly reaffirm our new doctrine of cooperation: free, balanced cooperation, based on mutual respect and shared benefit.”
China isn’t stupid, and has been working for years to increase its influence on the African continent. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is wrecking every avenue of America’s soft power, but it will all presumably be worth it when Stephen Miller doesn’t ever get asked to press 1 for English.
The United States is co-hosting the World Cup in 2026 with Mexico and Canada. Then it is hosting — in Los Angeles, for more of that irony we so love — the Summer Olympics in 2028. We don’t know why any countries would feel safe sending their athletes here to participate in these events. And DHS has been so capricious in its enforcement that we imagine many athletes will have visa issues, especially if they are representing one of the however many dozens of countries that Donald Trump might have slapped with a travel ban. There are supposed to be exceptions for athletes in such circumstances, but who is going to stop our immigration authorities from ignoring them?
We would be completely unsurprised if either the Olympics or the World Cup get pulled from the US. We wouldn’t even deny that we deserve it.
[LA Times / CNN / The Bulwark / LAist]
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