the same billionaire that funds your favorite sports team also funds ICE

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Last Wednesday, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by ICE officer Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. Good was in the driver’s seat of her car after dropping off her 6-year-old son at school with her wife, Becca. Renee and Becca were recording ICE officers in an effort to support their neighbors, Becca wrote in a statement. The Trump administration quickly attempted to paint Good as a “domestic terrorist.” Protests erupted across Minnesota, as ICE escalated its violence in neighborhoods all over the U.S. This past year was the department’s deadliest year in over two decades, with 32 people dying in ICE custody, according to reporting by The Guardian. Good’s is the second known death at the hands of ICE so far this year.

Last Thursday, the Minnesota Timberwolves held a moment of silence for Good, and the Minnesota Frost followed suit a few days later. At The Nation, Dave Zirin wondered if the sports world would finally wake up and speak out about the horrors under the Trump administration. Instead, the last few days only revealed how little sports teams actually care.

In an attempt to address their communities' pain while also respecting the imaginary barrier between sports and politics—and to avoid angering ownership, whose money is lining their pockets—teams and leagues are sending mixed messages. Fans reported that Grand Casino Arena staff at the Frost game confiscated signs and shirts that directly opposed ICE. The Timberwolves did the same. But Good did not die of natural causes, nor was she the victim of senseless violence; she was killed by the American government. Honoring her memory means recognizing the full context of her death.

Whether sports leagues want to admit it, Renee Good’s death was political. She was a queer woman and an American citizen killed by a government agency while legally videotaping their violent behavior against her community members. Just by nature of putting her name and photo on the Jumbotron, those teams have made a political choice. Policing signage in the stands doesn't change that.

“I had a strong expectation that they would be taking this sign,” Cathy John, who had their sign confiscated at the January 11th Frost game, said in an Instagram video. “I just could not imagine going to a game in the Cities and fully ignoring the violence and the kidnappings and the murder that is taking place on Minnesotans at the hand of our federal government right now.”

Teams like to acknowledge tragedy, but shirk the cause. Last year, Angel City FC handed out Immigrant City t-shirts to fans at a game amid escalating ICE raids in Los Angeles, yet confiscated anti-ICE signs from fans — as if celebrating the city's immigrant heritage at the same time as large-scale crackdowns were taking place was merely a coincidence. The leagues often blame venues for these decisions, and PWHL sources told The Hockey News that the removal of anti-ICE signs was done by staff at Grand Casino Arena and not by the league itself. However, according to John, security texted a photo of her sign to someone at the PWHL, who punted the decision to the venue, claiming it wasn’t a league issue. But as John points out in their video, the league stepped in last season when fans were asked to discard a “Let’s Go Lesbians” sign by a venue in Buffalo during a Takeover Tour game. The league can step in when it chooses to. In this case, it chose not to.

As always, it’s important to follow the money. Billie Jean King and her wife, Ilana Kloss, may be the two most visible owners of the PWHL, but the majority of the league's financing comes from the Mark Walter Group. Mark Walter and his wife, Kimbra, also own the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Walter is the CEO of both Guggenheim Partners and TWG Global.

Guggenheim Partners owns a 0.38% stake—valued at over $12 million—in GEO Groups, one of the largest private prison corporations, which has contracts for building and maintaining ICE detention centers. Meanwhile, TWG Global has partnered with Palantir, which provides much of the tech used by ICE to monitor and surveil immigrants.

This means that the Minnesota Frost had a moment of silence to honor the legacy of a woman who was killed by a government agency whose work is partially funded by the owner of the Frost itself. No wonder they’re afraid to say anything negative about ICE; their money is heavily invested in ICE's activities, too.

This is the challenge women’s sports teams face across many leagues, including the NWSL and WNBA. They want (and perhaps need) the funding of billionaire owners, but billionaires only become billionaires by funding and profiting off the powerful systems that drive this country. And those systems almost always oppress marginalized people, whether incidentally or by design. Women athletes and their fans are often members of the communities those systems were built to squash.

So fans who adopt teams as reflections of themselves and their communities receive only lip service in return in moments when sports teams have their greatest potential to address injustice. Sports teams happily embody their fans in the best of times, but their facades crack as external pressure mounts, revealing the truth: That in order to exist, those teams have all made deals with the devil, and there's no point expecting better.

This newsletter was edited by Louis Bien.