Why the LA Dodgers Stood Up to ICE

The Los Angeles Dodgers have long had a transactional relationship with the city’s Chicano and immigrant communities. In 1949, the city seized land for Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine from a Mexican community that had turned the greenspace into “an immigrant Shangri-La.” Families would come to the park and say, “Your uncle lived where the third-base line ends at home plate.”

Then in the 1980s, a young pitcher from Mexico, Fernando Valenzuela, became a Dodgers icon. When Fernandomania arrived, Angelenos of Mexican descent filled the rafters of the stadium, and team management welcomed the crowds. Today, to go to a game is to see multigenerational Chicano families decked out in Dodgers blue and eating Dodger Dogs. They are the heart and soul of this fan base, and that is why pressure has been rising on the World Series champions in this current climate of terror facing Latino immigrant communities.

People in the city have been waiting for team owner Mark Walter to step up and say something about the ICE riots in Los Angeles. And yet, as their fans were being thrown into trucks by badgeless, masked, armed ICE agents—or at least that’s what these thugs said they were; there’s no way to confirm who they actually were—the Dodgers have tried to stay out of it.

That is no longer the case. On June 20, the Dodgers announced that they would give $1 million to families of immigrants “impacted by recent events in the region.” The team didn’t exactly denounce ICE, but the message was clear: It understood that it couldn’t work with the Trump administration and expect its fans to remain quiet.

The events that led to the Dodgers pledging money to its immigrant fans started a few hours before a game between the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres when a line of black SUVS and white vans attempted to enter the stadium parking lot. The people in the vehicles were masked, and they carried neither badges nor warrants. Photos were flying around social media as people wondered if the Dodgers were allowing an armed, warrantless immigration checkpoint inside and outside the stadium. But Dodgers security, on orders from up high, would not allow them into the stadium grounds. As the extralegal army that is ICE searched for another place to set up, dozens of people showed up on a tweet’s notice to protest and film them. The feds scurried off, to fight (and again lose) another battle—this time in public relations.

Locals praised the Dodgers when the team announced on social media that it had realized who actually buys their expensive tickets and sent Trump’s attack dogs on their way.

ICE and DHS, in contrast, have been snippy and defensive since they were shown the door and initially, and laughably, just posted tersely, “False. We were never there.” Then they admitted that Customs and Border Patrol were there as photos and videos flooded social media. Emily Phillips of an Echo Park Rapid Response network reported that the feds said that they needed the stadium to process detainees since doing so out in the open at Home Depot would be “too dangerous.” It should frighten as well as offend everyone that such a cowardly, frightened group gets to be masked and armed and arrest people without warrant.

Let’s be real. It would be a mistake to think that the Dodgers, whose ownership and (some) players visited the White House several months back and kissed the ring, are born again. This was done because of all the people who bravely stood up to the LAPD, the National Guard, the Marines, and whatever motley group of agencies has been diverted to California—a state that, like Greenland in the springtime, Trump clearly wants to seize. And yet the actions by the feds here is also an escalation. They expect to be able to use a stadium to “process” those suspected of being undocumented—or even worse, that they can pull people out of the crowd at a ballgame and throw them into the backs of white vans. Given the history of stadiums being used across the globe as mass holding cells, with all kinds of small rooms perfect for “enhanced interrogations,” it would be particularly traumatizing for those connected to countries where sports arenas double as torture chambers. “The fact that these raids continue is what we Angelenos should be very concerned about. Dodger Stadium is a place where Angeleno families come and have fun,” said Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights member Jorge-Mario Cabrera.

We need instead to make sure that the calculus for the Dodgers ownership isn’t just ticket sales or a ratings drop. They need to know they will be publicly humiliated if they so much as bat their eyelids in ICE’s direction. The owners need to stand up not only for their profits and not even only for their fans, but because they owe it to the ancestors whose homes the team destroyed in Chavez Ravine. The bare minimum reparations should be standing with their community of fans and players in the face of a manufactured crisis. Dodgers ownership did not want this fight. But it’s come to them, and fans are forcing them to pick the right side.