June 20 Friday roundup

This week’s episode of the podcast summarizes what millions showing up to protest on No Kings Day means in counterpoint to Trump’s parade on Constitution Avenue Saturday evening. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read instead of watching or listening, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

There’s a story from my childhood I’ve been wanting to tell, but I’ll save it for next week. Today, I’ll address something else that’s been on my mind for months: how public venues and entertainment sites serve as targeting areas and holding sites in the early stages of a concentration-camp regime. That’s when a ruling party gathers more power by strategically rounding up civilians for detention without trial based on race, ethnicity, political affiliation, or religious beliefs.

As I started drafting this post Thursday, a standoff developed at Dodger Stadium between what appear to have been ICE or CBP agents staging some kind of action and locals opposed to their presence, as well as the Los Angeles Police Department. ICE at one point claimed they were not ICE agents, saying they were Border Protection personnel instead. Elsewhere, there seemed to be some confirmation it was ICE.

The stance of the LAPD and team ownership remained unclear well into the afternoon, when the team announced, “This morning, ICE came to Dodger Stadium and requested permission to access the parking lot.” The front office relayed that ICE was denied entry to the grounds by the organization.

I first thought about covering the issue of big public venues and extrajudicial detention months ago, just after the election, when I was pondering what people might need to know in a second Trump administration. The issue felt urgent again earlier this week when I read that Customs and Border Protection officials had promised on a social media post to show up “suited and booted” during the first round of the FIFA Club World Cup this month.

FIFA reportedly reached out to CBP about the post after a general outcry. Meanwhile, ticket prices had begun falling from over $300 per seat, winding up as low as $4. The “suited and booted” post was deleted at some point afterward.

In recent days, people have begun speculating about the fate not only of the Club World Cup games this summer, but the 2026 World Cup itself. Trump’s plan for visa bans on travelers coming from 36 additional countries (along with restrictions already imposed on other nations) raise serious questions. Will players really be able to enter the country? Once in, will they be safe from detention and removal?

The bans ostensibly offer exemptions for sporting events, but the situation is a nightmare for those competing. Andrea Florence of the Sport & Rights Alliance asked FIFA to require legally binding promises before allowing games to proceed. Yet even if players and managers somehow extract some guarantees for their safety, significant risk will still remain for fans, as long as ICE and CBP are present on security teams.

***

The moral quandary FIFA faces is not unprecedented. In September 1973, after a military coup in Chile toppled the democratically elected government, those suspected of opposing the junta were rounded up, detained, tortured, interrogated, and sometimes murdered, with bodies disappeared so that they could never be produced as evidence.

Concentration-camp regimes that detain a large number of civilians often use large public venues—like sporting stadiums—in the first weeks and months of rounding up opponents. That initial period allows time to build purpose-built camps, though some countries continue to use the public settings long after dedicated camps have been established.

In the case of Chile, detentions at the National Stadium in Santiago were known to the public in September 1973. Accounts of prisoners held there and rumors of much worse gained coverage worldwide in the weeks following the coup. At the same time, the stadium was also the planned setting for a World Cup match between the Soviet Union and Chile scheduled for November that year.

Diving deeper into events from those months, I’ll share a story from my book One Long Night. Not long after the coup, Felipe Agüero—a young advisor to the the Allende government that just had been overthrown—was captured by the junta. He was eventually taken to Santiago’s National Stadium.

When I interviewed him in Chile a decade ago, he told me he had been to the stadium many times as a child, and had even competed in a track meet there. But on arrival as an adult, he was left in a hallway then corralled into locker rooms with other prisoners, none of them convicted of anything. They had little food, no beds, and not enough room to move. Detainees repurposed the narrow shelves for gym bags into sleeping ledges for a lucky few, with everyone else on the floor, where they slept head to toe in coordinated shifts.

The junta approached the U.S. for help with detention solutions to the crisis they had created, but Washington realized how toxic public help would be in that moment. International outrage over arrests and disappearances led the government to make minor concessions, in an attempt to paper over abuses. Detainees were brought out and allowed to sit in designated sections on the bench seating around the stadium for brief periods during the day.

As the government tried to improve its image via public relations, Agüero began to receive small packages from his family. By their bare contents—a few cigarettes, a little bread—he realized that those on the outside were likewise in trouble.

Agüero was soon called over the PA system to what he guessed would be a torture session. At first he was beaten with nunchaku and burned with cigarettes. Later, he was marched to the velodrome on the stadium grounds, where he waited again in the stands. People who were taken away returned in a horrible state. He couldn’t imagine what had happened to them to cause such visible suffering in a short period of time. When his turn came, he found that interrogators were using electrical torture.

He managed to survive, and went on to many years of work in the U.S. and Chile, including publicly accusing his torturer after recognizing the man’s face at an academic conference. In response, the torturer sued him, and Agüero returned to a still-unsteady Chile to testify in the lawsuit.

In the end, his interrogator from the stadium all those years ago was discredited, and the libel suit dismissed. The torturer lost his job. Though he would never be imprisoned himself, the case was a watershed moment for the country in acknowledging the terror Chile had inflicted on its own citizens.

We now have the opportunity to keep these kinds of events from happening in a country consumed with detention fever. Agüero’s grim story offers some hope for justice to prevail, if we speak and act against the wrongs done to us and to others.

But I want to focus for a moment on another aspect of the story. While people were undergoing torture sessions and occasionally being allowed into the stands during the daytime, Agüero one day noticed men in suits out on the pitch, apparently measuring it and recording information.

The stands held people in desperate shape, said Agüero, but the men in suits never seemed to look up. Later, he remembered the World Cup game that was quickly approaching. He realized the visitors were likely FIFA officials.

The prisoners were moved out of the facility weeks later, in order to clear the stadium ahead of the match. If FIFA had any qualms about the police state hosting the game, the federation did not keep officials from allowing events to proceed.

On the day of the match, protesting the human rights situation, players for the Soviet Union never took to the field for the match. After scoring a point on a pitch with no opposing players, Chile was declared the victor.

***

In 2022, FIFA disappointed anyone who hoped it had taken that earlier lesson on human rights to heart, when it allowed Qatar, rife with its own abuses, to host the World Cup.

The conundrum FIFA is facing now is even bigger, with multiple matches scheduled here in the U.S. in the coming weeks. The U.S. government is currently violating human rights nationwide and via overseas detention. If FIFA proceeds, it might abet abuses against its players. Even with promises from the administration, who would feel confident right now guaranteeing no action will be taken against fans attending the games?

We’ve already seen that there are countless institutions that will roll over in the face of authoritarianism. Many people will measure the grass and look away, pretending not to see the violence staring them in the face or the people against whom it’s inflicted. They will give ground not just on immigrants but on the very nature of government by the people and anyone who opposes Trump’s overreach.

But others can be prodded to notice, if we make it clear what’s happening. And just like the protesters who stood against federal agents Thursday outside Dodger Stadium, just like the team representatives who denied those agents entry into the parking lot ahead of tonight’s game, standing up can shift the trajectory of events.

My sense is that large public venues where people gather will likely become a much bigger problem in the coming weeks and months. This pattern is something that has happened not just in Chile, but again and again all over the world. And the risk is not just harassment of attendees or players at events, it’s that, as in Santiago, absent anyone actively prevent it, these venues are likely to become initial detention sites themselves.

The drive to make 3,000 arrests a day—carried out sloppily and illegally—is being pursued without sufficient beds to hold detainees. Combined with massive overcrowding at existing facilities, this puts pressure on ICE to make use of other places, as they have done with improvised holding areas at federal buildings in Los Angeles and Manhattan in recent days.

There are many historical examples of what comes next. At the beginning of World War II, Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt would find herself detained by French authorities at a sports facility—the Vélodrome d’Hiver—in Paris before being sent south to the concentration camp at Gurs. (Arendt would escape, but after the fall of France, many Gurs detainees were deported to Auschwitz.)

Arthur Koestler fled the Nazis in the 1930s only to end up handcuffed, punched in the back, and interned by the French government at the Roland-Garros tennis stadium, which had been surrounded with barbed wire. Fred Korematsu, an American citizen whose legal case contesting detention of Japanese Americans became the monstrous basis for camps in the U.S—was initially held at Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, California.

Each of these camps came to be seen as deeply shameful to the nations instituting them. We’re already much further along than any of the examples of alien enemy detention in the prior paragraph, which were wartime camps. Today, the Trump administration has already tried to apply the Alien Enemies Act outside war, using it to disappear U.S. residents, sending them to brutal detention that’s intended to be permanent.

What’s more, our perverted system of dealing with immigration has led to cruelty from Democratic and Republican administrations alike in recent decades. Expanding detention as a response to border crossing has weaponized government against everyday people, whom authorities are now desperately trying to criminalize. And for decades, no administration has committed to reversing this approach.

In recent years, dozens of sports arenas and meeting spaces around the country have already been repurposed, at least temporarily, for use in immigrant detention. For several months in 2021, San Diego’s Convention Center held minors who had crossed the border unaccompanied.

At a convention center in Dallas the same year, children had been kept for more than a month without going outside and did not have enough to eat. Staff at the facility told reporters that some of the young detainees had become suicidal.

When we as a country allow initial harms like this to be done through what might feel like neutral policy, we normalize bureaucracies and physical spaces in which not only can significant abuse take place, but more malicious actions can be carried out by even worse actors. At this point, we’re likely on the cusp of that harm happening at public venues in new ways.

"Could you imagine if they did an ICE raid in the parking lot of the LA Dodgers stadium?” sportswriter Clay Travis asked days ago on Fox News. “That would be kind of amazing."

What is the point of this kind of language, when everyone knows the role the network has in both spurring the president to cruel actions and reinforcing the administration’s worst tendencies? I would argue it’s joy in terrorizing those who seem helpless. It’s a sickness in our society right now.

But we can do a lot to interrupt or stop these tactics. You can check with your local officials and press for legislation that blocks CPB and ICE from using area facilities and businesses as staging areas or for detention purposes. You can talk to local businessowners yourself, and push for written agreements not to collaborate. There are many tools at our disposal from protests and boycotts to punishment (or support!) at the ballot box in local elections.

As we saw this week at Dodger Stadium, we don’t have to let the apparatchiks take over. We don’t have to let officials pretend all this is business as usual or look away. They know what they’re doing is shameful. It’s why they hide their faces. We can make politicians and businesses understand that they can stand against these abuses or face accountability themselves for everything they allow to happen.