The Dodgers Owe More to Their Latino Fan Base
Forty percent of their fans are Latino, but the team has been silent as protests against ICE have raged.
THERE IS LITTLE ARGUMENT THAT the Los Angeles Dodgers are the most Latino team in baseball. The team hosts Mexican and Salvadoran heritage nights. Fernando Valenzuela is a revered figure. The ballpark features live mariachi bands before and after postseason games.
But as the Trump administration has militarized the team’s home city, the Dodgers have remained notably, painfully quiet.
There’s been no expressions of solidarity with the immigrant neighborhoods under siege; no acts of protests as immigration officials invaded garment districts or sprang ambushes outside Home Depots in L.A. The few remarks the team has offered have sounded like they were filtered through several committees of professional communications consultants—and then a handful of lawyers.
“I know that when you’re having to bring people in and, you know, deport people and just kind of all the unrest, it’s certainly unsettling for everyone,” manager Dave Roberts said during his pregame press conference on June 13. He was speaking just hours after Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), at a federal building in L.A., had been wrestled to the ground and handcuffed for trying to ask Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem questions about the ICE actions in the city.
Roberts then added that he didn’t know enough “and can’t speak intelligently on it.”
The Dodgers’ muted response to the humanitarian and political upheaval in their hometown has been so pronounced that it’s caused unease among their fan base and talk among local commentators about whether a boycott should be in order. It also contrasts sharply with how many professional sports operated during Trump’s first term.
Back then, both individual athletes and whole teams were regular combatants with Trump in his culture wars.
When players knelt for the national anthem, Trump told a crowd he would like owners to say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now . . . he is fired.” He later called on fans to boycott the NFL because of players’ demonstrations for social justice. Trump withdrew an invitation to the White House for the NBA-champion Golden State Warriors because star guard Steph Curry said he would not attend. In 2018, Trump dis-invited the NFL champion Philadelphia Eagles, which one player attested was because so few teammates planned to attend the White House reception. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police in the summer of 2020, many athletes embraced the Black Lives Matter protests and more fully embraced social and political activism. Lebron James launched a black voting campaign in the run up to the 2020 election, which Trump lost.
Four-and-a-half years later, few if any athletes or coaches are speaking out against Trump (Steve Kerr being perhaps the biggest exception). The professional leagues are guarding against getting too political, and even a banal slogan like “end racism” is apparently out of bounds. Championship squads aren’t just going to the White House now, their star players are riding with Trump on Air Force One.
No team has been tested like the reigning champion Dodgers. The team accepted a White House invitation in April, during which Trump rained praise on the players and Roberts, as stars Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani looked on. Since then, however, the president has sent National Guard and Marine troops into Los Angeles and said the ICE escalation will continue there. The pressure is growing for the organization to take some sort of stand.
A Los Angeles Times column by Dylan Hernandez titled “Cowardly Dodgers remain silent as ICE raids terrorize their fans” said that “The Dodgers boast that more than 40% of their fan base is Latino, but they can’t even be bothered to offer the shaken community any words of comfort.” It has not gone unnoticed that two L.A. soccer clubs—Angel City FC and LAFC—both issued statements sympathizing with the residents experiencing “fear and uncertainty,” while Angel City players wore shirts emblazoned: “Immigrant City Football Club.”
The backlash against the Dodgers owes not just to the size of the team’s Latino fan base but to the organization’s weighty history as both a leader and a failure on race relations.
The Dodgers franchise, then in Brooklyn, was famously the first to integrate its squad when Jackie Robinson debuted in 1947. But when the team moved west, it did so by building a stadium on a scrapped public housing project for the Chavez Ravine community in Los Angeles. The move, in 1958, resulted in “predominantly low-income Hispanic communities” being evicted, according to a Library of Congress research guide.
Journalist Nick Valencia wrote on his Substack that his grandfather was among the original 300 families displaced when eminent domain was used to bulldoze neighborhoods to make way for Dodgers Stadium. He drew lines between that dark chapter in the franchise’s history and recent incidents in which lifelong Dodgers fans were asked to remove traditional Mexican scarves known as serapes that were deemed “offensive” by security. In another incident Monday night, a woman at Dodger Stadium held up an anti-ICE sign to immediate cheers from fans who could see it. As security moved in to walk her out, video shows fans booed loudly.
Valencia views the team’s current conduct as a betrayal of many Dodgers fans and their families who came of age during the rise of Fernando Valenzuela, the most successful Mexican-born pitcher in MLB history.
“What all my diehard Dodgers fan friends are talking about is that connection,” Valencia told me. “Fernando Valenzuela is in our bones, Fernando-Mania is in our DNA. The Dodgers, where a young Chicano like myself saw themselves, birthed one of the most, if not the most, dedicated fan base. This is an organization inextricably linked with the community, so people are wondering, why are they now tone deaf and falling short?”
This past week, Nezza, who calls herself a “Spanglish pop princesa,” posted a video of the Dodgers asking her not to sing the national anthem in Spanish. She sang it in Spanish anyway. The post led to strong praise for Nezza and social media backlash against the Dodgers.
“I know people who visit these games have been affected by this,” Agustin Rios, who runs a popular YouTube channel called Heroes Reforged, told me. “It’s kind of emotionally scarring to be here in L.A. knowing this is going around. I’m an American citizen, but I still feel unsafe, so for them to be quiet, and to ban Nezza, all of a sudden it feels so disrespectful. It makes you wonder, is there something coming from top brass telling people not to speak up?”
The Dodgers are not expected to formally ban Nezza. But the singer herself posted it was “safe to say I’m never allowed in that stadium ever again.”
While she may be persona non grata at Dodgers Stadium, some of her fellow artists have stood up for her. Snow Tha Product, a Mexican-American rapper and singer, faced a similar situation when she was asked to perform for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns on Chicano Night in 2022, and was chided by the team for referring negatively to American leaders like Trump.
“This is when the line is in the sand and when everybody is going to kind of come out of their pandering and at some point we have to understand the history of the Dodgers and understand these corporate America companies love our culture, but don’t always love us,” she told The Bulwark.
Dodgers infielder Kike Hernández did release a statement Saturday on Instagram, expressing love for the city that has given love to him. But the post steered clear of directly mentioning Trump or ICE, choosing to keep the critiques broad.
“I am saddened and infuriated by what’s happening in our country and our city,” he said. “This is my second home. And I cannot stand to see our community being violated, profiled, abused and ripped apart. ALL people deserve to be treated with respect, dignity and human rights.”
Asked to comment, a top communications official for the Dodgers refused to go on record. The off the record remark—which we officially cannot relay—was four words amounting to nothing.
With Trump showing little sign of backing away from his desire to crack down on L.A. and other cities, such reticence may soon no longer suffice. The team is already starting to see real unrest among its fan base for not speaking out more forcefully.
On Monday, the Brown Bag Mornings show on Power 106 in Los Angeles listed the recent incidents in the city and noted the lack of a public statement from the team.
“How many times do we see its Mexican Heritage Night! It’s Salvadoran Heritage Night! Do they check documentation when you buy a ticket?” co-host Rosecrans Vic asked. “They don’t, but they’re happy to accept that money.”
Later in the show, co-host Letty Peniche went even further.
“This is pretty trippy—are we going to boycott, are we going to expect more?” she asked. “This is us publicly saying to the Dodgers, ‘We love you, you’ve been so much a big part of our lives. This doesn’t mean we hate you, but this does mean we need you, bro.’”
Correction (June 18 2025 11:20 a.m. EDT): An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed comments made during a Brown Bag Mornings broadcast to co-host Angie Fernandez that were actually made by her fellow co-host Letty Peniche.
This is what American minorities face. Monied interests are happy to take our money, but won't stand in the way of anyone else treating us poorly and ultimately taking that money away. America has to decide that it is not a white Christian nation, but a nation of immigrants and democratic ideals. Anything short of that will result in decline for all of us.
The Dodgers have 24 hours to come out strongly against the immigration raids, ICE as a whole, and the militarization of LA, or they can fuck off forever. I will never support anyone who does not support my community.