Masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, started patrolling the streets of Los Angeles in unmarked vans in early June. Soon after, the board of the apartments where Vladimir De Jesús Santos lives sent out a mass text. It warned residents that agents had been spotted in Koreatown, two blocks away. Santos panicked. A cinematographer and film editor, and the son of Salvadoran immigrants, Santos knew that the Trump administration had started an aggressive campaign to detain and deport his city’s undocumented residents. His father has American citizenship but speaks English poorly, so Santos wondered how he would explain his status if agents confronted him. His mother has a green card, “but the news coming out was that it didn’t matter,” he said. “My fear and paranoia were ratcheted up 1000 percent.”
ICE’s mandate was to seize and detain individuals who were in the United States illegally, or even seemed like they might be. Most of those targeted were Spanish speakers. Within days, forces of resistance mobilized. Karen Bass, the city’s mayor, denounced the raids as “sowing terror,” declared a state of emergency and imposed a downtown curfew. José Gomez, the archbishop of Los Angeles, wrote on a Catholic website a vivid portrayal of the panic the raids had caused: “People are staying home from Mass and work, parks and stores are empty, the streets in many neighborhoods are silent.” Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Football Club issued a statement of solidarity. Angel City F.C., which plays in the National Women’s Soccer League, went a step further, distributing 10,000 shirts that temporarily rebranded the team as “Immigrant City Football Club.”
But Santos’s favorite team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, stayed strangely quiet. The Dodgers are arguably the most popular sports franchise in the area, and a cultural touchstone for Latinos. Like many others, Santos assumed they would support beleaguered immigrants. Yet as videos circulated of ICE seizing Angelenos, often violently, the Dodgers said nothing, apart from a single supportive Instagram post by a player, Kiké Hernández. “We knew we were being made an example of — not just Latinos but all of Los Angeles,” Ingrid Rivera-Guzman, president of the Latino Coalition of Los Angeles, says. “And the Dodgers’ silence felt complicit.”
Many Latinos were already angry that the Dodgers, who won last year’s World Series, accepted the traditional invitation to visit the White House in April. As the raids intensified, so did the outrage. More than 40 percent of the Dodgers’ fan base is Latino, Dylan Hernández wrote in a Los Angeles Times column that tagged the team as “cowardly.” But the Dodgers, he continued, couldn’t “even be bothered to offer the shaken community any words of comfort.” A host of “Brown Bag Mornings,” a popular Hispanic radio show, raised the possibility of a boycott. When the singer Nezza came to Dodger Stadium to perform the national anthem and saw so many Latinos in the stands, she sang in Spanish.
The discontent apparently made an impact. On June 18, the Dodgers notified select media outlets around Los Angeles — websites popular with Spanish speakers, and a few larger-circulation publications — that they would make a gesture in support of the city’s immigrants the following afternoon. Whether it was attempted intimidation or coincidence, a column of unmarked vans drove to the security shack outside Gate A of Dodger Stadium the next morning, before a statement could be released. The driver at the front of the procession requested access to the stadium parking lots so federal agents could use them to process detained immigrants.
The parking lots are private property. The agents didn’t have an appointment, prior permission or a warrant, so the guard on duty didn’t let the vans enter. They then drove to Gate E, where another guard turned them away and asked that they leave the area. Instead, they remained in the parking lot for more than three hours. A crowd gathered — neighborhood residents, anti-ICE protesters, a cluster of reporters. Helicopters hovered, recording the scene. Around noon, the vans finally were escorted from the stadium by the Los Angeles Police Department. As it turned out, they may not have even belonged to ICE. Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said that D.H.S. personnel were “in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement.”
A day later, the team announced that it was contributing $1 million to aid families who were affected by the deportations, though details were vague. “We have heard the calls for us to take a leading role,” the Dodgers’ president Stan Kasten said in a carefully worded statement that did not mention ICE or immigration, only “recent events in the region.” Since then, no Dodgers executive has commented publicly on any aspect of the raids. Within two weeks, America First Legal, a nonprofit co-founded by the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, filed a civil rights complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission, accusing the Dodgers of “apparently engaging in unlawful discrimination under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’”
The Dodgers are a conspicuously multicultural franchise. Herradura tequila and Estrella Jalisco beer are prominently featured at Dodger Stadium, where mariachi bands often perform live. Images of the most popular Los Angeles Dodger ever, Fernando Valenzuela, can be seen around the ballpark. More relevant, perhaps, Mark Walter, the team’s controlling owner, contributed to the campaigns of Barack Obama and the former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. It hardly requires a leap of imagination for the team’s executives to feel at risk of retribution from the Trump administration.
“These are unprecedented times,” said the former California senate president Kevin de León, who wrote the sanctuary bill that gave protection to the state’s undocumented immigrants. De León suggested that the lawsuit against the Dodgers might only be an opening salvo. The administration has been zealous in its attempts to punish those who seemed critical of, or even unaligned with, the president and his agenda; what began with law firms that helped prosecute criminal cases against Trump continued with sanctions against universities and cultural institutions, and lately the Federal Communications Commission’s campaign to silence the late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel. Why wouldn’t the Administration demand equity in the Dodgers, as it had from Intel, de León wondered. Or perhaps a $1 billion settlement like the one requested of U.C.L.A.? “It’s a shakedown,” he said. “It’s a scene from ‘Goodfellas.’”
Still, understanding the Dodgers’ predicament didn’t make their caution any easier for Latinos to accept. Americans look to sports to help tell the story of who we are, or at least how we perceive ourselves. No franchise has promoted inclusion — and, therefore, an implicit acknowledgment of the institutionalized racism of the past — more than the Dodgers. In 1947, they integrated the major leagues by bringing Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn. After moving across the country a decade later, they pioneered Spanish-language radio broadcasts and courted Hispanics. As political activism became more common for athletes before and during the first Trump administration, the Dodgers were highly visible. “They’ve had a really impressive history of seeking to include,” says Angelica Salas, the executive director of CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles, and a lifelong fan of the team. “For sports, they defined what it meant to stand with people who were excluded and marginalized, and to speak up against racism.”
But the Trump administration wants sports to tell a different story, one that emphasizes uncomplicated heroics by patriotic Americans. The struggle over how athletes and the teams for which they play should express themselves — or whether they should express themselves at all — is perhaps the most visible manifestation of these competing visions. And as the Dodgers fill their stadium for nationally televised playoff games while ICE’s vans continue to roam their city’s streets, the team and its fans have become that struggle’s main protagonists.
When Walter O’Malley, then the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, flew over Chavez Ravine in a helicopter in May of 1957, it struck him that the parcel of nearly empty land only a few miles from Downtown Los Angeles would be an ideal place to put a baseball stadium. Three communities of mostly Mexican Americans — about a thousand families — had been forcibly removed from the land starting in 1950 to make room for a federally funded development for 10,000 residents. But that ambitious project was aborted and the land returned to the city. If he could have it, O’Malley told city officials that he would build a stadium for the Dodgers there.
O’Malley saw something else on that helicopter ride: the Southland’s striking capacity for growth. Los Angeles was bordered by the Pacific Ocean to the west and nothing but sparsely populated open space everywhere else. By the time the Dodgers arrived for the 1958 season, waves of immigrants from Latin America had already started to transform the city’s demographics. “O’Malley immediately saw the potential of that market,” says the broadcaster Jaime Jarrín, an Ecuadorean who joined the team’s nascent Spanish-language radio team in 1959 and stayed through the 2022 season. At that time, Jarrín estimates, fewer than 10 percent of Dodgers fans had Latin American heritage. These days nearly half the stadium crowd each day does. That didn’t happen by accident. “The Dodgers have been very, very smart over the years in establishing relations with the Latino community,” Jarrín says.
It seemed fitting. Through the middle of the 20th century, the Brooklyn Dodgers — affectionately nicknamed Dem Bums — were New York’s blue-collar counterpoint to the blue-chip Yankees. From the 1930s through the 1950s, the Dodgers were not only the team of the Jewish and Italian immigrants of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side but also the sentimental favorite of everyone who loved an underdog. When Robinson arrived in 1947, the Dodgers were adopted by fans of color across the country and those who identified with the underrepresented and beleaguered.
In Los Angeles, that meant Latinos. Jarrín’s daily broadcasts, along with standouts like Manny Mota and Valenzuela, welded the Dodgers to Latino identity. Fans listened to Jarrín, “and that brought them to the stadium,” said Mota, who became the Dodgers’ first notable Latino player when he was acquired from the Montreal Expos in 1969. And once these fans came to Dodger Stadium, Mota added, they tended to return. “The Dodgers let the Spanish people know how important they are to the team.”
The impact that Valenzuela in particular had on baseball in Los Angeles is hard to overestimate. He was a shy 19-year-old who spoke almost no English when he was brought up to the Dodgers in September 1980, attributes that today might land him in the back of an ICE van. The next season, he emerged as a phenomenon, winning the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards and becoming the biggest gate attraction in the game. “When he became a superstar, they became the Mexican team,” Vinny Castilla, who grew up in Oaxaca and played in the big leagues for 16 seasons, says about the Dodgers. “And for Mexicans who came to this country, it became very important for them to support their team.”
To those who crossed the border and settled in the Southland, there was no stronger symbol of their newly gained status as Americans, and Angelenos, than the blue Dodgers hat. “If you didn’t grow up in L.A., it’s really hard to understand just how critical to the city’s identity the Dodgers are,” says Javier Cabral, the editor in chief of L.A. Taco, a website that originally covered tacos, graffiti, cannabis and the other elements of Los Angeles street culture that most news outlets ignored, and now also employs that deep knowledge of the city’s neighborhoods to chronicle ICE’s daily incursions. “When you first move here and try to fit in, whether as a kid or as a working-age person, you’re most likely going to go to a Dodger game. You put on a Dodger hat, and you instantly become someone from L.A. rather than an outsider.”
For today’s Hispanic immigrants, Dodger Stadium is a comfortable place. Spanish music often enlivens the dead time before the game. Many employees are bilingual. Nights honoring the heritage of Latin American nations dot the promotional calendar. Players acquired from other teams are often surprised by the ethnic composition of Dodger fans. “When I arrived, I started driving through the Spanish neighborhoods,” says the relief pitcher Anthony Banda, a third-generation American of Mexican heritage who grew up in Texas and played for seven other major league teams. “And everywhere you go, you see the hats, you see the jerseys, you see the Dodger logo. It’s literally the symbol of this place.”
That support for the Dodgers spilled into the streets of the city after they won the World Series last fall. Some 250,000 people attended the victory parade through downtown. “My entire family was out there — my daughter, my nieces, my nephews,” CHIRLA’s Salas says. “Our people were out there in the street celebrating with the Dodgers. We were feeling so good. And then what happened? They went to see Trump.”
At Distrito Catorce, a restaurant off Mariachi Plaza in L.A.’s predominantly Latino community of Boyle Heights, the anger the Dodgers provoked by putting Donald Trump’s name on the back of a jersey and presenting it to him has been evident for months. Since the restaurant opened during the pandemic, fans from surrounding neighborhoods have gathered there to watch games, including last year’s World Series. And four years ago, when Jarrín retired after more than six decades as the Dodgers’ Spanish voice, he held a party there. By summer, though, Distrito Catorce’s owner, Guillermo Piñon, sensed the mood turning. His customers now talk about the team in a way he hadn’t previously heard. “Like, ‘Oh, the Dodgers, they suck,’” he says.
A mural that covers the restaurant’s back wall includes larger-than-life representations of Jarrín, Valenzuela and the pitcher Sandy Koufax. Recently Piñon asked the artist who painted it to replace it with one that would feature local leaders who, he says pointedly, have supported the community. “What the Dodgers are doing now is going to have an effect for a long time,” he says. “It’s going to affect generations.” His restaurant still shows games on TV, but he vows not to return to Dodger Stadium. “Before, I was like, I can’t wait to be a grandfather and take my grandkids to a Dodger game,” he says. “Now what I’m going to teach them is about these times, and why grandpa ended up taking the mural down.”
By July, social media was awash in anti-Dodgers sentiment from Latinos. L.A. Taco’s Cabral circulated a video of a Latino fan getting a Dodgers tattoo removed. On Instagram, the actor George Lopez, for years a strident supporter of the team, posted the sarcastic suggestion that ICE agents dress in the uniforms of each night’s opponents. “During the seventh-inning stretch they can remove fans, since their loyalty to the team means nothing,” he wrote. “Everybody’s like, ‘You’re not a real Dodger fan if you don’t stick with them when times are hard,’” Salas says. “And I supported them even during their worst seasons. But now is one of the toughest moments in our experience as an immigrant community.” She continued: “Are the Dodgers sticking with us? Where are they?”
In late August, the Dodgers held their fourth annual Salvadoran Heritage Night. Under normal circumstances, Santos would have been waiting for the gates to open by the middle of the afternoon. For the initial Salvadoran night, in 2022, he went with the woman who would become his wife for one of their first dates, and brought his mother too because he didn’t want her to miss it. “The whole Salvadoran community in L.A. felt elated that we were being given a night, a space to celebrate our culture,” he says. “Everyone I knew was there.” But this year, sitting in his apartment during those first terrifying days, he vowed not to attend any games for the rest of season. Two weeks before the event, Santos wrote a column for L.A. Taco calling on fellow Salvadorans to “let them know where we stand by forgoing financial support” of Heritage Night — in other words, to boycott it.
Santos was surprised by how much attention his piece received. Still, he was dubious that the call for a boycott would have a noticeable effect. Despite their deep disappointment in the Dodgers, most fans remain invested in their success. Encountering the protesters who occasionally gather outside the stadium holding signs that condemn the team’s silence, many will shout or make a gesture to show their support. Then they’ll keep on walking and head into the game. And of course, Latinos are politically diverse; some support Trump’s immigration policy. Despite the dissatisfaction, the Dodgers still led the major leagues in attendance this season. In September, they surpassed four million fans for the first time in franchise history.
Two hours before Heritage Night’s ceremonial first pitch, a crowd filled the stands behind center field. The lines for vendors selling pupusas, pan con pollo or yuca fries con chicharron snaked across the plaza. Nearly everyone there had pulled on the commemorative Dodgers jersey with a splash of Salvadoran blue on the front that was included with a special ticket package. A traditional dance group performed in a whirl of colors on a stage beneath the bleachers. Yet there was a palpable unease. Like other Latinos, the Salvadorans had treaded carefully for months. If many hadn’t been going to Dodgers games, it was because they hadn’t been going much of anywhere. To be sure, the Dodgers had turned away those vans two months before, but because they had been silent since, nobody could be sure how they regarded Trump and the raids. “Any Latino person you ask here will tell you that the ICE presence outside the gates that day really impacted things,” Allen Estrada, a Los Angeles-born Salvadoran American, said as he waited to buy pupusas stuffed with cheese and beans. Attending a heritage night like this, he said, “could be scary for a lot of people.”
As soon as the Dodgers took the field, all of that vanished. They remain baseball’s most exciting team; the first three hitters in their batting order — Shohei Ohtani, Betts and Freddie Freeman — are almost certain to be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame, as is that night’s starting pitcher, Clayton Kershaw. Watching the first few innings from behind first base, the talk I heard was all about how the team was doing. Had Betts finally worked his way out of his slump? Would Kershaw get a start in the playoffs? And when Freeman lashed a ball to left field and Betts came around to score, the roar sounded as loud as a World Series game. For the first time since I arrived in L.A., the roaming vans of government agents seemed a distant threat.
The Dodgers were baseball’s best team in 2024, and over the winter they managed to get better. They added both hitting and pitching, including Blake Snell, a former Cy Young Award winner, and two coveted relievers, Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates. Such profligacy appeared to give them a clear advantage, one that prompted a debate among fans and journalists about whether they were ruining baseball. The tenor of that argument was captured on a Reddit thread titled “Honest question: Why don’t the Dodgers just sign all the players in M.L.B.?” To many fans, a second consecutive championship seemed all but assured.
Yet by late summer they had squandered a nine-game lead in their division, and even qualifying for the playoffs was in doubt. The causes for the disappointment were varied, including a disproportionate number of injuries, ineffective relief pitching despite the new additions, and Betts’s suffering through the worst season of his career. Some of the Latinos I spoke with even wondered if having so many fans upset with the team might be unsettling the players. “I hope that bothers them,” Salas says.
Whether that had an effect or not, the Dodgers only held a one-game lead over San Diego, their closest divisional rivals, when Salvadoran Heritage Night began. The game was tied, 1-1, when I left Dodger Stadium in the fourth inning to find Santos. He was at Frank ’n Hanks, a dive bar in Koreatown, watching the Dodgers with friends on a TV mounted under a string of colored lights. One of those friends, Eldrick Bone, who has Mexican heritage, was wearing a T-shirt commemorating Valenzuela. Bone dismissed the idea that the team had been put in a difficult position. “What’s happening is so blatantly wrong,” he said. “This should be an easy win. It’s a meatball down the middle.” Another friend, Michael Lorenzo Porter, is a Panamanian American actor who recently performed in an audio play as a ghost who lived in Chavez Ravine before Dodger Stadium was built. “In a normal year,” Porter said wistfully, gesturing at the others around him, “we would have all been at the game together.”
On the screen, the Dodgers had extended their lead to 6-1. Santos told me that if someone had offered him free tickets for the game, he wouldn’t have accepted them. “That’s sanctioning what they’ve done,” Bone chimed in. “They try to make amends — like $1 million toward an immigrant fund or whatever, which would have been really cool in 1990. I mean, they have so many contracts now that are ridiculous, outrageous, and they give $1 million? That shows me they are not in tune with the Latino community.”
But if $1 million doesn’t mollify Bone, what would? It wasn’t some amount of money, he explained, but evidence that the Dodgers realized their fans were suffering, no matter what their legal status. “You’re talking about 40 to 50 percent of Dodger fans,” he said. “That’s a ton of people who are watching, and they want you to know how they feel because they’re upset. They’re scared. They’re not coming out of their homes.”
A few weeks later I spoke with Miguel Rojas, a Dodgers infielder from Venezuela, before a game. When I asked about the threat from ICE, he said that he understood the disquiet the fans must be feeling. He and the other Latinos on the team were feeling it, too. Los Angeles has “a big population of Mexicans, people from Guatemala, people from Honduras,” he said. “And like them, we came here as immigrants, to work and chase a dream. And as soon as the game is over and the lights are off, when I take my car and drive to my place, I’m an immigrant too. I’m here with my green card, and I’m concerned about my rights. What do I do if something like that happened to me? Or to any of my family?”
Rojas told me he copes with the uncertainty by focusing his attention on each game. Baseball gives him a respite from thinking about what happens outside the sanctuary of the ballpark. He hoped it did the same for fans, many of whom were surely at greater risk than he was. “Trying to bring the joy to people who come to the stadium, to bring a good show every single night” — that was a contribution that he and the other players were able to make, a singularly apolitical one that would have seemed appropriate in, say, the middle of last century.
But before I left, he added something different. “You’re always going to feel for the people in the streets and what’s happening out there,” he said. The next day, he had two hits and the Dodgers won. Then he put on his street clothes and went out into the night, another immigrant finding his way home.
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