Olympic Spirits on ICE
This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.
Donald Trump made the United States a bad place to visit the second he got back into office.
German citizens Jessica Brösche, 29, and Lucas Sielaff, 25, were among the first tourists he locked up. Brösche was carrying tattoo equipment when she reached the California-Mexico border last February 18; agents decided she intended to work illegally. Sielaff spoke little English, misunderstood a question, and answered it wrong. For those crimes, the U.S. government threw them in San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Center. Sielaff got out after a couple of weeks, but agents held Brösche for more than a month longer, including stashing her in solitary confinement for eight days, an experience she likened to “a horror movie.”
Then there was Welsh artist Rebecca Burke, 28, whose “trip of a lifetime across North America” was cut short when she tried to cross into Washington state from Canada. La migra sent her to an immigration camp south of Seattle on February 26, “despite being a tourist with no criminal record,” her dad said.
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Agents detained many more sightseers and vacationers, some of whom they forced to strip naked and endure a full-body search before ejecting them. They blocked an Australian MMA coach with a visa to conduct a seminar, holding him temporarily in federal prison. They forced British commentator Sami Hamdi to leave in the middle of a speaking tour because he dared to criticize Israel. They detained Khaby Lame, the world’s most popular TikTok star with 160.8 million followers, because of unspecified “immigration violations.”
More than 68,000 people were in immigration detention as of December 2025, an all-time high. At least 32 have died in custody. More will be snatched, imprisoned, and murdered in 2026, with the paramilitary force carrying out the abductions bolstered by $150 billion in new funding.
This is the environment to which Trump expects foreign visitors and international athletes to come for the 2028 Summer Olympics, hosted mainly in Los Angeles, with some events in Oklahoma City. Immigration officials have terrorized residents in both cities all year, in episodes that have left people traumatized and dead. Organizers expect 15 million visitors for the quadrennial spectacle. But Los Angeles residents, activists, and researchers told me they fear for those visitors’ safety, and their own.
“I just see the Olympics as being a target for raids,” said Shirley, a lifelong Angeleno, who spoke on condition of using only her first name. “Tourists really don’t know what to look forward to other than the Olympic celebration, and behind it there’s much more going on.”
For all of her 39 years, Shirley has lived across the street from Exposition Park, where the 22,000-seat soccer arena, BMO Stadium, will host flag football and lacrosse. Sporting events and venues were major targets for immigration agents throughout 2025. They were spotted repeatedly at Dodger Stadium, and an asylum seeker was arrested while taking his children to the Club World Cup soccer final in New Jersey last July.
“I’m born here, I’m a citizen, but during the raids, just because of the color of my skin, I was scared to go out,” Shirley said. “If I were a tourist traveling to the U.S., and to L.A. specifically, I would think about it twice.”
The threat of immigration roundups could worsen an already dodgy economic bet that cities around the world almost always lose: that economic activity for a couple of weeks can justify the massive infrastructure outlay needed for global competitions like the Olympics. Los Angeles, which hosted the Games just 42 years ago, vowed a “no-new-build” Olympics relying on existing venues. But that is fantasy; officials are spending billions of taxpayers’ money. What if nobody shows up, preventing Los Angeles from recouping this investment?
OLYMPIC GAMES ROUTINELY RUN OVER BUDGET and provide scant benefit to the cities that host them. Accountants last September finally put the cost for the Paris 2024 Games at 6.6 billion euros, for example, significantly more than the original 5.9 billion estimate. National auditors claimed that did not represent “budgetary overspending,” according to Le Monde and AFP, and that taxpayer exposure to the bill was “contained.”
The Olympics routinely fails to draw as much money as officials say it will. Beijing’s Summer Olympics in 2008 cost $40 billion and brought in just $3.6 billion, for example, while the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro cost more than $20 billion and required a $900 million emergency loan from the Brazilian government weeks before the Opening Ceremony. Tokyo’s 2020 Games cost $13 billion but brought in just $5.8 billion.
Venues constructed for Olympic play routinely lie dormant just months after the athletes go away. Sochi, Russia, which hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014, quickly became a ghost town, with empty ski lifts, racing tracks, and housing for athletes and the media. It was not the first set of Olympic facilities lying in ruins.
The overall picture is misplaced optimism and ruinous debt, with little regard for local communities in the secretive deals between lawmakers and executives. All the bidding war drama between different cities? The hopes of towns to be center stage for the world? “It’s a con,” said Jules Boykoff, professor and department chair of political science at Pacific University in Oregon, who represented the U.S. Olympic soccer team in international competition. “Money almost always drives what the Olympics does.”
Los Angeles is the only Olympics financial success in recent memory. The 1984 Summer Games, managed by local businessman Peter Ueberroth, generated a $215 million operating surplus; Time named Ueberroth Man of the Year for pulling off such a feat. Yet two years out, there are warning signs that regular Angelenos will not benefit from the next Games or its infrastructure projects, though they are paying for it and also shouldering the risk of financial disaster.
Take the claim of LA28, the private group responsible for the Summer Games, that the Olympics will be a “zero-cost” event. The organization, whose chair is Casey Wasserman, grandson of Hollywood legend Lew Wasserman, said it has a “balanced budget” of about $7.15 billion, which it will cover with money generated by the LA28 Games themselves. But that budgetary figure is nearly $2 billion above the original $5.3 billion bid to cover the event, a 35 percent increase.
Since they don’t have to build any new infrastructure for venues, the group says, taxpayers won’t be liable for any of the cost. They’re using existing sites like the L.A. Coliseum, the Pasadena Rose Bowl, and Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium and Intuit Dome.
Yet all those claims are exaggerated. Los Angeles is undertaking a massive infrastructure project funded primarily by taxpayers. The city cannot accommodate millions of visitors without a major transit upgrade, so it is racing to complete 28 transportation projects by 2028, including extending light-rail lines, adding more buses, and expanding the I-5 freeway. Just nine of those projects are complete. LA28 isn’t covering the cost; the majority of funding is coming from sales taxes on purchases in Los Angeles County. City officials have repeatedly begged for $3.2 billion from the Trump administration to help with the cost. But it hasn’t materialized yet.
In addition, last October the city council voted unanimously to allow zoning exemptions for any Olympic construction projects, contrasting the claim that no construction will be necessary. That includes a $2.6 billion project to upgrade the L.A. Convention Center, which will host taekwondo, fencing, judo, wrestling, and table tennis. The modernization is being funded through city-approved bonds, not LA28, and legislative analysts expect residents to shoulder an $89 million average annual burden for the next 30 years.
The ultimate guarantors of LA28’s investments are Angelenos. As LAist explained late last year, taxpayers are responsible for the first $270 million of potential LA28 losses. Statewide taxpayers must pay the next $270 million. “L.A. City is then liable for … anything and everything after that,” Chris Tyler, communications manager of community group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) and a member of the NOlympics L.A. coalition, an advocacy group protesting the Olympics, told me in an email.
The same is true in Oklahoma City, where taxpayers are ultimately responsible for the $34.5 million guarantee that Mayor David Holt signed to protect LA28. “It’s a check we’re never going to write, but it is a check we have to account for,” Holt told The Oklahoman. The paper noted that the deal “occurred in secret because LA28 … needed confidentiality as it worked through the process,” but did not explain why.
Los Angeles has failed to hammer out an “Enhanced City Resources Master Agreement” contract, which it was supposed to do by October 1, 2025. That means there’s no agreement for the cost of Los Angeles Police Department officers, traffic control, trash removal, paramedics, or any of the other services that will increase for weeks as the Games and the Paralympics, scheduled after the Olympics, proceed. At a December meeting, city officials discussed whether they would sue LA28 over those costs and met with legal counsel about it, according to the L.A. Times.
After the Los Angeles City Council voted to approve the Olympic Wage Ordinance, increasing hotel and other workers’ hourly minimum wage to $30 by July 2028, bosses decided that was too generous. Now the increase is on hold until voters decide via a June 2026 referendum.
And the new transportation hubs and rail lines? What people really need are more and faster buses, community members say. “I’m a transit rider, I don’t own a car. We ride the bus in L.A.,” said David, an organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, who spoke on condition of using his first name only. “Build more bus lines. Working-class people would use those buses. The trains are not nearly as utilized, and where they are being constructed is displacing transit riders.”
It’s especially unlikely that locals will use the flying taxis that LA28 is planning with Archer Aviation, which in November bought a regional airport about six miles away from LAX, Hawthorne Airport, for $126 million in cash to use as the “operational hub” for its L.A. air taxi network and as a “test bed for the AI-powered aviation technologies it is developing.”
But the biggest reason to question L.A.’s ability to repeat the success of 1984 is that back then, there wasn’t a massive federal-level immigration dragnet tanking tourism across the country.
PICTURE LOS ANGELES PREPARING for the Games. There are federal agents, National Guard soldiers, local police by the thousands, and more than a dozen bomb detection dogs helping “scores” of human bomb disposal experts. Picture two paramilitary hostage rescue teams with silencer-equipped machine guns, and “a task force of antiterrorist specialists” staffed by intelligence agents. Picture a city with multiple checkpoints for athletes, visitors, and locals alike, locked down so hard that a reporter from Kyodo News Service said it looks “almost like a military base.” You need a plastic card bearing your identity, information, and a magnetic strip to get into events and locations. In fact, security is the “largest in peacetime,” including 100 helicopters that clog the city with omnipresent noise as they watch the whole town from the sky. Agents are watching from the ocean, too, some in a 399-foot icebreaker, others in smaller vessels, securing the port.
That was the scene in the summer of 1984. Under cover of providing Olympic security, the LAPD stockpiled their arsenal, using federal funds. Before and during the events, the LAPD and the FBI conducted “sweeps” to empty the streets of poor people of color so rich visitors wouldn’t see them,then continued doing so in the months that followed. In February 1985, an LAPD SWAT team “used a military-grade V-100 tank-like vehicle received from the Olympics and equipped with a 14-foot battering ram” to bust down a door of a suspected drug haven, only to find “two women and three children eating ice cream,” with no guns or drugs other than a small stash of weed. Forty-two years later, the LAPD continues to hoard war machines to use against Americans.
“So many people on Flower Drive remember the Olympics in the ’80s, their sons swept up in those mass arrests,” said David, the South Central organizer, referring to the homes directly across from Exposition Park and to the abuses that came during and after the 1984 Games. Those included the notorious Operation Hammer, a brutal 1988 raid on two apartment buildings seen as a precursor to the Rodney King beating and the 1992 riots.
Now picture all of that and add Trump’s obsession with spectacle, more high-tech weapons and surveillance, and federal agents bent on ethnically cleansing the U.S. People on the ground will be unable to approach any venue by car and will endure surveillance checkpoints. That’s one thing for visitors and another for ordinary residents, “who are going to be subject to the multiple rounds of screening,” said SAJE’s Tyler. “There’s a kind of psychological infrastructure being developed where any and all mechanisms deemed necessary to the event will be justified and rationalized,” he added. LA28 has largely hidden the details about their plans from residents; as Tyler put it, “everything is really under tight lock and key.”
Civil rights advocates are warning of more CCTV in the city, drones overhead, and facial recognition everywhere. “We feel the Olympics is a Trojan horse that’s bringing more federal agents, more types of surveillance, and bringing more policing,” David said. He’s already noticed more outdoor cameras and more federal agents roaming everywhere; a local developer who wants to buy up neighborhood homes has taken to flying a drone over tenant union meetings when they gather outside. “The surveillance is coming from a lot of directions,” he said.
The fact that the success of the Games hinges on getting transportation funds from the Trump administration is disturbing, said David, who feared local officials could concede to Trump’s wishes as a result, allowing federal immigration agents to raid events and harass and imprison people. Folks in South Central have a name for the 2028 Games, he said: “Trump’s Olympics.”
Trump has already designated the Games a National Special Security Event, which puts the Secret Service in charge of security. The Secret Service answers to the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for Trump’s mass deportations. The Big Beautiful Bill contained $1 billion in funding for the 2028 Games, but only for “security, planning, and other costs.” In October, the president off-handedly suggested moving the Olympics from L.A. if the city was not “prepared properly.” He threatened to deploy the military and the National Guard.
An August executive order established a security task force for the Games; Trump made himself chair of it. “This extraordinary occasion offers a powerful opportunity to showcase American strength, pride, and patriotism while welcoming the world to our shores,” the order said. “The Federal Government will lead a unified effort to ensure maximum safety, secure borders, and world-class transportation for millions of visitors throughout the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.”
But at the same time, Trump has barred or restricted visitors from more than three dozen countries whose residents are mostly Black and brown. Under the “Restricting and Limiting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the Security of the United States” executive order, the administration is fully barring from entry any citizens of Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Laos, Libya, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Palestine, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Trump is limiting people from 19 other countries, including banning all tourists, students, and exchange visitors from Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The order contains a special carve-out, exempting “any athlete or member of an athletic team, including the coaches, persons performing a necessary support role, and immediate relatives, traveling for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event as determined by the Secretary of State.” But that’s impossible to trust, and it’s been proven incorrect by events.
For example, Iran was forced to boycott the scheduling announcement for the 2026 World Cup, also taking place partially in the U.S., because members of its delegation could not obtain visas. It was the latest in a series of visa denials for international athletes, including the Cuban women’s volleyball team, the Senegalese women’s basketball team, and a world-class Brazilian table tennis player who took home a silver medal at the recent World Championships. Several IOC members hail from countries under the Trump travel ban, including its leader, Zimbabwe’s five-time Olympian Kirsty Coventry.
More recently, the Trump regime in January denied 14 of Ethiopia’s athletes scheduled to compete in the World Athletics Cross Country Championships, held in Florida, according to LetsRun.Com. The visa rejections knocked the country out of the competition entirely and ended its record-breaking run of medals, starting with the gold in 1982.
Trump subsequently said the U.S. would suspend all visas for 75 countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Iran, Nigeria, Russia, Somalia, and Thailand, starting January 21.
Trump makes major decisions on a whim and based on moment-by-moment events, such as announcing he would “re-examine every single alien” who came to the U.S. from Afghanistan, after a man from that country in November allegedly shot to death two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C. “Will this affect the amount of people coming to the U.S.?”Boykoff asked. “Absolutely.”
EVEN COUNTRIES NOT BLACKLISTED are warning that Trump’s America isn’t safe to visit, including some of America’s closest allies. A month after agents imprisoned multiple tourists from Germany, that nation issued a travel advisory warning that U.S. border agents have the final say on granting entry, even if a tourist has a valid visa or entry waiver. The March 18 advisory stated that “even the slightest irregularity or infraction could result in detention.” Germany subsequently warned travelers in November that “American cities nationwide are facing an increase in violent crime,” and that there is a “continued heightened risk of politically motivated violence.”
The message is: “Don’t come here,” Sielaff’s fiancée, Lennon Tyler, told the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. “Especially not if you’re on a tourist visa, and especially not over the Mexican border.”
Milder but still stern warnings have come from the governments of the United Kingdom, Norway, and Canada, among other nations. And these came before the Trump administration’s December announcement that it has proposed a policy change to require tourists seeking entry to hand over all social media activity for the last five years; personal and business phone numbers used in the last five years; personal and business email addresses used in the last ten years; IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photographs; the names, birthdates, places of birth, and addresses of parents, spouses, siblings, and children, plus all their phone numbers for the last five years; and the would-be tourist’s face, fingerprint, iris, and DNA. Federal officials proposed the change after revoking the visas of several people who criticized gun rights activist Charlie Kirk after he got shot in the neck and died.
Human rights advocates and members of the European Parliament called the proposed rule “outrageous” and something “even the worst authoritarian states in the world” don’t demand. Officials urged FIFA to get involved in advance of this summer’s World Cup games. But considering that FIFA president Gianni Infantino is the president’s fan and ally who showed up at a Gaza cease-fire summit and gave Trump a fake peace price last December, any criticism is likely to be muted at best.
The list of requirements for a tourist visa “is a huge disincentive to travel to this country in the first place,” Tyler said. He’s skeptical about the projected level of tourism, especially considering that the FIFA Club World Cup was so poorly attended this past summer.
“The FIFA World Cup tickets were available for pennies on the dollar because so many people were not wanting to leave their homes, not wanting to subject themselves to these screenings and checkpoints,” Tyler said. The threat will be even bigger for the Olympics. “I wonder who is going to be here,” he said. “Who is going to take those risks that will be involved in entering this country?”
Ongoing immigration raids have already kept visitors away from Los Angeles. International tourist arrivals to the city fell 8 percent through August 2025, which meant more than 170,000 fewer people visiting than in 2024, according to Visit California. In September, economists doubled the amount the U.S. tourism sector was expected to lose in 2025. The “staggering” $12.5 billion loss expected in May has grown to $30 billion.
California officials estimated at a state Senate hearing last summer that the Olympics will generate $18 billion in economic activity, create 90,000 full-time equivalent jobs, and bring in $700 million in state and local tax revenue. But those projections are based on a 2017 study, conducted before Trump’s war on immigrants. A more recent study from the Southern California Association of Governments in December estimated the regional boost in gross domestic product to be between $13.6 billion and $17.6 billion. Even that study fails to take seriously the impact of Trump’s immigration terror campaign. It notes that “federal policy changes” will result in “a drop in net foreign immigration in the hundreds of thousands,” but adds that “economic theory suggests that resulting labor shortages will be resolved by markets.” L.A.’s economy, it states, is “resilient.”
“The crackdowns on L.A. and beyond are going to have an enormous effect on the spirit of the Olympics in 2028 and recouping the money being spent on the Games,” Boykoff told me.
If tourists do stay away and Olympic revenues are low, the impact will be felt with budget crises and reduced services for L.A. residents, disproportionately affecting the poorest.
International sports fans are already showing they’re willing to do so. In just one day in early January, almost 17,000 people canceled their tickets to attend the 2026 World Cup taking place this June in the U.S., as well as Canada and Mexico. The mass cancellation, prompted by fears and anger over Trump’s rising fascism, forced FIFA to schedule an emergency meeting. U.S. social media users are continuing to call for fans to stay away from the tournament, using the hashtag #BoycottWorldCup and urging people to “Embargo the fuck out of us. Sanction our athletes, our businesses. Do whatever you gotta do, world,” as TicketNews reported.
I asked LA28 detailed questions about the situation, including how it plans to keep people safe during the Olympics; the organization’s expectation for how Trump’s immigration policy will affect foreign athletes, fans, and Angelenos; what LA28 is doing to ensure foreign visitors’ and locals’ safety during the Games, especially regarding interactions with ICE; and the portion of revenue expected from foreign tourists.
A spokesman ignored all those questions and said via email only that the organization “is committed to working with all stakeholders to welcome athletes and visitors from around the world and deliver the safest and greatest Games for Angelenos and beyond.”
FOR PEOPLE LIVING IN THE CROSSHAIRS of Trump’s terror campaign, like Shirley, David, and other residents in South Central L.A., it’s baffling to imagine anyone would take the risks of their personal liberty to watch a sporting event. By the end of 2025, Los Angeles was already crawling with federal immigration agents, who between June and December arrested more than 10,000 people suspected of violating immigration rules, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The primary factor that appeared to prompt arrests was whether someone looked Latino, which, as Shirley described, applies to citizens and noncitizens alike.
Agents raided car washes, farms, food trucks, Home Depot parking lots, restaurants, and Angelenos’ very homes. In some instances, witnesses said agents “detained all Latino people,” regardless of who they were, snapping up U.S. citizens and people with authorization to be here. Most had no previous criminal history.
“Who would come to this?” David said. “Who would come from Mexico to see the Olympics that’s being celebrated by Trump?”
Mexico should boycott the Games, David said. So should all Latin countries and everyone else. “We sympathize with them, the athletes, but this is an infrastructure that is being built, much like the Nazis used, to celebrate a fascist state, to surveil and ethnically cleanse a community,” he added. “That’s what’s happening in South Central L.A. It’s really hard for us to understand who would come to celebrate this.”
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