Will ICE Show Up at the World Cup?
When immovable idiotic policy meets the unstoppable economic force of FIFA’s World Cup, it turns out we all lose.
ICE AT THE WORLD CUP. Will it actually happen?
There are reasons to believe it will. After all, in February, ICE Director Todd Lyons, who has since announced he is resigning at the end of May, said at a congressional hearing that ICE would be a “key part” of World Cup security.
And there are reasons to be skeptical. One is that the high-profile ICE raids of the first year of the Trump administration sparked so much political backlash—especially after Homeland Security agents killed two American citizens—that they cost former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem her job, forced Border Patrol frontman Greg Bovino into retirement, and compelled the administration as a whole to switch to a lower-profile strategy. ICE, notably, did not show up at the Super Bowl—even despite the Bad Bunny of it all.
But what if the answer to the question falls somewhere in between? That’s what sources in national immigration politics and in Texas are bracing for. They told me they think the more likely danger isn’t that ICE sets up checkpoints on the way to or from World Cup matches, but that agents
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