I stopped and started drafting many pithy sports/politics takes this week, particularly about Tottenham’s inability to score a goal or the Philles’ failings against the Braves, but my mind kept drifting back to recent news in San Diego. According to reports, it is “now the epicenter of California’s immigration crackdown.” Recently, ICE has been detaining people, including parents, near schools and during school hours in communities I used to work for.
Last year, I wrote about ICE’s initial foray into San Diego, and I connected it to the billionaire class that owns our sports teams. Below is that essay, lightly updated and edited.
A years-old tip alleged fake papers, so agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement dressed for the Battle of Fallujah and came to my city, to a pizza joint. They found middle class people eating pizza and the staff that served it. ICE arrested four people, dishwashers and servers.
No one served pizza or washed dishes that night. The restaurant had closed after the raid. No one served pizza or washed dishes the following Monday or Tuesday. The restaurant had closed to regroup. A community reeled. Democratic lawmakers demanded answers. Republican lawmakers gloated, or they said nothing. The Otay Mesa Detention Center processed four new detainees.
A few days later and a thousand miles north, Seattle Sounders players protested the revenue split for the Club World Cup, so team owner Adrian Hanauer dressed down his employees. The Club World Cup is a tournament organized by the nation-state of FIFA. It stands to make millions, millions that trickles down to continental governing bodies and club owners.
MLS players will not make millions. The collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players is silent on the Club World Cup, it being a recent invention. Hanauer wants to hoard the Sounders’ take. In a week or so, the workers he cursed out will play in the competition on spec.
If the illusion of freedom was a coin, then these events would be its two sides.
Hanauer embodies how liberty in the US has become synonymous with wealth. If taxes are communism, then neoliberalism is freedom. Freedom, then, is earned and wielded, like capital. Rich people have the most of it and so they are most uninhibited.
Hanauer scolded his employees not because he signs their checks and not because they wanted fair pay. He lashed out so forcefully because the players attacked the scaffolding of his existence. If capital is freedom, then who is Hanauer with less wealth? He must defend his soul—his bottom line—and he’s free to. No one will hold him to account for acting like a child.
Hanauer is a man not happy enough to be cut into a monopoly. He is not happy enough to control one of the best soccer teams in North America. He is not happy enough with all the freedom money can buy. I’m sad for him.
The immigration enforcement in San Diego and elsewhere reflects a belief that freedom and liberty, like wealth, are limited. If someone is free, or wanting to be, then that must come at the expense of someone else. Oppression is the tool to allot the freedom.
There is no policy basis to ICE’s actions. There is only the need to be dominant, for a worldview premised on scarcity requires someone to lose. Those losers are always the most vulnerable. To justify the oppression, the losers must be villainized. They must be hated, and the more they are hated the more free the oppressors are.
It is exhausting to hate people. It is costly to hate people. I think of Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. He is a man not happy enough to ascend to the highest office in the country, twice. He is not happy enough to be the president’s right hand man. He is not happy enough with all the freedom that his status as a white native-born American affords. I’m sad for him.
“When you stomp on the part of yourself that is repulsed by this kind of cruelty, something important dies.”
It’s a line Ezra Klein has used a lot. One thing that dies is freedom.
We have rights and laws and rules and regulations, but liberty doesn’t derive from paper. It comes from within and is expressed socially. It’s the ultimate act of faith. My freedom relies on people believing I’m free, that I’m worthy of being free, even when I am not good. And my freedom relies on my believing that people, wherever they’re from and whatever their status, deserve the same. Encouragingly, it’s apparent that the people in power targeting workers and families will not and cannot extinguish that faith.
The Sounders players held fast to their position after Hanauer admonished them. San Diegans ran armed and masked ICE agents out of their neighborhood with nothing but their voices and phones, proving how pathetic and insecure the MAGA movement is. Donald Trump and his ilk persecute us today, but their fear is beyond mine.
Thank you for your social conscience. Not too long ago—a couple of years to be exact—it might have been possible to enjoy rooting for one’s team over a beer. But the private equity pirates are also coming for your favorite team. Soon ICE will be showing up at stadiums to arrest the hot dog vendors. There’s a playbook for anesthetizing the masses so they accept the loss of freedom. There’s also a playbook for resistance. You’re writing it now.
Fabulous insight!