Trump's Immigration Crackdown Threatens What Makes Sports Great
It’s not just the World Cup and the Olympics—baseball, basketball, and other sports are getting hit too.
Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Be sure to stay hydrated in the middle of the action this week.
We're focusing on immigration this week, and how the sports world is affected by everything that's going on in the Trump administration's crackdown. This is all having a bigger impact on sports than you might think.
But first, congratulations to all our Indiana fans on their national championship! What a game. What a time to be alive. Also, many thanks to all of you who played in our Bowl Mania pick'em competition, and congratulations to our much-deserving winner: me. (Too bad there's no prize!)
Don't miss sports coverage from Jason Russell and Reason.
Locker Room Links
- If the college basketball game-fixing scandal has you thinking every game is rigged, just remember we're talking about less than 0.25 percent of games in the last two seasons. Yes, this is another scandal that was caught thanks to legalized sports betting.
- Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) asked, "To level the playing field, shouldn't NFL playoffs be held in domed stadiums?" and got absolutely roasted for it.
- "Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair has been fined $11,593 for wearing eye black that contained the message 'stop the genocide.'…Al-Shaair was fined for violating NFL uniform and equipment rules by wearing eye black that contained a personal message." Reminder that last season Nick Bosa was also fined for wearing a MAGA hat during a postgame interview.
- The wife of Plaxico Burress (yes, the NFL player who accidentally shot himself in the leg during the 2008 season) is running for Congress in New Jersey as a Republican.
- Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Joe Rogan briefly talked about the Enhanced Games and performance-enhancing drugs on Rogan's podcast.
- This sounds awesome: The Australian Open held a single-elimination tournament of tennis "matches" consisting of a single point each with 48 players, plus local amateurs and some celebrities. An amateur player ran the table to win 1 million Australian dollars (which is just $671,330, but I'd still be happy with that).
- Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme: Jamaica's bobsled and skeleton team will have three sleds in next month's Olympics.
- Elsewhere in Reason, our coverage of the Supreme Court case weighing the constitutionality of state laws banning transgender athletes from school sports: "Brett Kavanaugh Is Rightly Skeptical of a Nationwide Ruling on Trans Athletes" and "Eyes on Gorsuch as SCOTUS Weighs Transgender Student Athlete Bans."
- This is not a thing.
I enjoy the Army-Navy game as much as the next guy. But the President has no authority to tell broadcasters it's the only game people can watch at that time.
Broadcasters aren't state media. The President has no authority to dictate sports programming schedules. pic.twitter.com/WTFpnTZsPk
— Nico Perrino (@NicoPerrino) January 18, 2026
Cracked Down
We're mixing things up with a guest writer this week, as my colleague Fiona Harrigan takes the reins. Fiona is an immigration expert who's done some of my favorite immigration reporting for Reason about the Afghan allies left behind in the wake of the U.S. military's departure from Afghanistan, and how America's higher education system educates the best and brightest talent in the world and then doesn't let them stay. She's also a huge sports fan (don't worry, she doesn't even brag about her Patriots making the AFC Championship game). Her great piece below is about how the Trump administration's immigration crackdown is making sports worse—not just for international events like the World Cup and Olympics, but for baseball, basketball, and other sports too.
This June and July, 16 cities across Canada, Mexico, and the United States will host the FIFA World Cup. An estimated 6.5 million people will attend the tournament, and around 40 percent of them will come from abroad, according to a report by FIFA and OpenEconomics, a consulting firm.
In different times, the 11 American host cities could count on a relatively drama-free influx of foreign tourists—and their dollars. But that's not a sure thing this year. President Donald Trump's immigration restrictions are making it harder for athletes, coaches, and fans to come to the United States for sporting events, big and small. From the World Cup to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles to the completely mundane games Americans watch every day, the Trump administration's policies pose a serious challenge to the openness and spirit of international collaboration that make sports great.
The World Cup and the Olympics are unmistakably international affairs: 48 nations will participate in the 2026 soccer tournament, and roughly 200 countries will compete in the Los Angeles games. America's major sports leagues rely heavily on international players, too. Last year, 27.8 percent of MLB Opening Day rosters—265 players—were internationally born (the MLB includes 16 Puerto Rico–born players in that total). Every NBA team had at least one international player on its opening-night roster for the 2025–26 season, with the league reporting a record 135 international players across all opening-night rosters. The NBA also handles over 2,000 immigration and visa cases every year, said NBA Senior President and Head of International Basketball Troy Justice in an interview with NBC News. The NCAA reported in 2018 that 25,000 international student-athletes—about 5 percent of the NCAA's student-athletes that year—competed in its sports.
For all its benefits, the international nature of sports is leaving athletes and fans vulnerable to Trump's immigration crackdown. Last June, the Trump administration fully suspended the entry of nationals from 12 countries and partially suspended the entry of nationals from seven more. Trump expanded the travel ban in December, making 39 countries subject to restrictions. Athletes and members of athletic teams—including "coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives"—traveling to the U.S. "for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event as determined by the Secretary of State" were exempt from the June and December orders, according to the White House.
In other words, it's up to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to decide what major means. Just one month after the June order, a youth baseball team from Venezuela—one of the countries subject to a partial entry ban—was denied travel visas to participate in a tournament in South Carolina. Thankfully, the Trump administration granted an exemption to a different Venezuelan baseball team for the August Little League World Series. But the discretionary nature of this process leaves international athletes with a lot of uncertainty. (It also leaves observers with the obvious question: What does keeping a Venezuelan youth baseball team out of the country do for national security?)
Fans and athletes are running into issues even if they don't hail from a restricted country, thanks to slow visa processing and seemingly arbitrary visa rejections. "Tucson's Mexican Winter League baseball team will finish its season without playing a single game in the city," trying "for months to secure the updated U.S. visas needed" while facing "processing delays," reported Arizona Public Media in December. Several members of the senior Indian archery squad were unable to secure visas before the April World Cup in Florida, per The Times of India. Visa rejections kept 14 Ethiopian runners from taking part in the World Athletics Cross Country Championships earlier this month.
Visa processing has been one of the biggest points of concern leading up to the World Cup this summer. "Six countries have at least one U.S. diplomatic post with visa wait times that extend beyond the start of the World Cup," reported the Los Angeles Times in May. In a bipartisan letter that month, 55 members of Congress urged Rubio to improve visa processing by "providing adequate visa appointment availability," "strategically offering visa interview waiver services where appropriate," and "establish[ing] protocols for visa issuance and entry from countries that are sanctioned or do not have U.S. consular offices."
Late last year, the Trump administration unveiled the "FIFA Pass," which will allow people who have bought World Cup tickets through FIFA to schedule expedited visa appointments. "In about 80 percent of the world, you can get an appointment within 60 days," Rubio said during a White House FIFA Task Force meeting. But several countries that have qualified for the World Cup—Iran, Haiti, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast—are under partial or full travel bans. Despite the exceptions for competitors, team officials, and immediate relatives, "no allowance has been made for supporters," reported the Associated Press. Fans from the 39 countries under travel restrictions "will largely be unable to attend any games in the U.S." during the tournament "unless they have a valid visa issued before June 9, 2025 for the original 19 countries, or January 1, 2026 for the additional 20 countries," according to the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration organization.
The Trump administration's immigration crackdown is affecting domestic fans, athletes, and coaches, too. In June, the Los Angeles Dodgers said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had tried to enter stadium grounds. College coaches and international athletes told ESPN the same month that they were "unsure how to plan for recent changes in U.S. student visa procedures that could potentially wreak havoc on their rosters." Some coaches said "that as much as a quarter of their roster might not be allowed to enter the country" that fall if a pause on student visa processing persisted. High school football teams in "immigrant-heavy areas across the country" have seen "sharp declines in turnout for summer practices and workouts, especially after reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents patrolling their communities," reported Yahoo Sports in August.
There are huge financial implications here. The World Cup and the Olympics are multibillion-dollar events, and if fans and athletes can't or won't attend them, the U.S. will miss out on some economic benefits. American fans will suffer too, deprived of the chance to see athletes who fulfill all the criteria to compete at a high level but are denied entry by the U.S. government for senseless reasons. And the U.S. is throwing away an advantage that it's worked long and hard to build: "For decades, the US was recognized for its openness to international athletes and competition," wrote Bloomberg columnist Adam Minter in August. "Sports generated goodwill, as well as diplomatic, cultural and economics benefits, making it a US soft power. Now, the unwillingness to welcome athletes from everywhere is eroding it."
Given the international nature of not just major sporting events, but also domestic leagues and teams, it's no surprise that athletes and fans are getting swept up in the Trump administration's incredibly broad immigration crackdown. That crackdown is getting in the way of what sports can be in the global sense: an opportunity for athletes to put aside whatever issues their governments might have with each other.
—Fiona Harrigan
Replay of the Week
Fernando Mendoza had a great run, but a goalie fight will always get this spot.
GOALIE FIGHT ALERT ????
BOBROVSKY VS. NEDELJKOVIC ???? pic.twitter.com/YPjaIS7tTl
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) January 20, 2026
That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the weekend, Towson vs. Arizona in women's gymnastics.
