Welcome to Zooming In. I’m Berny Belvedere for The UnPopulist. The World Cup is finally here! It’s hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s the largest World Cup in history. On Thursday, Mexico kicked off the competition by beating South Africa 2-0, and the U.S. followed that up the next day with possibly its best-ever performance in the World Cup, a thoroughly convincing smackdown of Paraguay. Both Mexico and the U.S. started really strong and have their fanbases dreaming of World Cup glory.
On Wednesday, the eve of the cup, I sat down with León Krauze, contributing columnist at The Washington Post and host of the Boca de León podcast, to discuss the great tournament. Our focus wasn’t so much the soccer aspect of it all—but rather how this World Cup, thanks to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant maximalism, has in some key ways betrayed its own promise.
What makes León the perfect guest for this episode is that not only has he extensively covered the sport of soccer, including the history of Mexican soccer—but he’s also a leading commentator on U.S.-Latin American relations.
In our time together, we covered a number of incidents that are quite troubling. A FIFA referee from Somalia was detained at a U.S. airport and sent home. Iran’s federation had its ticket allocation pulled days before their first match—and the squad has had to relocate its base in Mexico. The acting ICE director [Todd Lyons] told Congress he wouldn’t rule out arrests at stadiums, contradicting the assurance that Secretary of State [Marco Rubio] had given Miami’s own host committee a week earlier. And Amnesty International published a report calling the United States, on the eve of the world’s party, a country facing a “human rights emergency.”
There was so much to cover we didn’t even get to everything. Iran’s players were issued visas only after being warned not to abuse the system, then ordered off American soil the same day as each of their matches. These are professional athletes that the U.S. is telling: “Don’t stay the night on U.S. soil.” In another instance, a Moroccan player was held up and nearly denied entry at a U.S. airport, reportedly due to his father’s appearance—specifically, his beard. Although DHS says ICE won’t be deployed for immigration enforcement at venues, its new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, said before the cup that “ICE is always going to do immigration enforcement.” Germany’s football federation has actually issued an official advisory to its own players to stay quiet on politics at this tournament. And looming over all of it: FIFA, under Trump’s personal friend Gianni Infantino, invented a “FIFA Peace Prize” out of thin air and handed it to Trump, who was sad over not winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
In our conversation, we hope the following comes through: We couldn’t be more excited for our favorite sporting event to get underway, but we couldn’t be more disappointed in how the build up to this tournament has in some ways proceeded in direct contradiction to how it was initially sold.
We hope you enjoy.
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