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.
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The post The Dodgers United Los Angeles. Then the ICE Raids Began. appeared first on New York Times.
