EDITORIAL: America to the world: stay away

If William Contreras and Jackson Chourio decided to take a walk along a street near Dodger Stadium and were spotted by some of the hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents patrolling Los Angeles to apprehend undocumented immigrants, odds are they would be accosted by an ICE squad.

All the ICE agents needed to justify stopping and questioning the pair would be that they had brown skin and Hispanic features.

When Contreras and Chourio would tell the ICE agents they were legally in the U.S., the agents would note their Spanish-accented English and issue a “show me your papers” demand. If the two men were carrying employment authorization documents, they might eventually be allowed to walk away. 

Or not.

Citizens of other countries with valid U.S. visas are routinely detained by ICE. The law firm U.S. Immigration Law Counsel advises on its website: “Having valid work authorization and no criminal history does not protect you from detention. Many nonimmigrants with valid employment authorization documents have been detained this year.”

If ICE decided to detain Contreras and Chourio, they would be handcuffed and taken to a detention center for up to 48 hours before, presumably, being released if their legal status was verified.

Contreras and Chourio are both citizens of Venezuela and are in the U.S. legally with temporary work visas. Their jobs are to work as catcher and outfielder for the Milwaukee Brewers. Both are Major League Baseball stars who helped their team win the National League Championship Series in Dodger Stadium last week, yet they are vulnerable to the hardhanded guilty-until-proven-innocent tactics that have become the norm for the Homeland Security Department’s campaign to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. 

In that hypothetical ICE encounter, the celebrity status of the ballplayers might save them some of the hassle, assuming the ICE agents were knowledgeable baseball fans, but other workers from Venezuela or any country—technicians, engineers, software coders, tourism and hospitality workers and men and women in other occupations—with similar work visas would not be as fortunate.

When HSD began its mass deportation campaign with a newly recruited army of ICE agents, it announced that the priority was to rid the country of undocumented immigrants who were convicted criminals. Former HSD Secretary Kristi Noem said, “The Trump administration has specifically targeted the worst of the worst.” President Trump said the agenda was to deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.”

Those pledges garnered the support of a majority of Americans for the administration’s immigration policies, according to 2025 polls. People of all political persuasions could agree that criminals without legal residency status should be removed from the country.

And yet, less than a third of the people detained by ICE in recent months have been immigrants with criminal convictions, according to FactCheck.org and the libertarian research organization Cato Institute.

The majority of those detained and, in most cases, deported are undocumented immigrants living, working, raising families and paying taxes in the U.S., including some of those who have legal status or are in the process of becoming citizens.

The indiscriminate nature of the immigrant dragnet suggests that its purpose is to rid the country of as many non-native residents or guest workers of other than U.S. nationality as possible, whether or not they qualify as the “worst of the worst.”

In August, the State Department put a stop to all visa applications as it develops plans to drastically reduce the number of people entering the country with work or student visas and to revoke the visas of hundreds of thousands of foreigners who applied for asylum. Administration defenders of the restrictions say they are needed to prevent people who enter the country on visas from getting government benefits.

That’s a shaky rationale. People who enter the country with work visas are required to pay federal taxes starting on their first day in the U.S. at the same rate as citizens. They also pay for Social Security and Medicare through payroll deductions even though they do not qualify for those benefits. (Contreras and Chourio are profitable visa holders for the U.S. Treasury. Likely at the highest tax rate, they pay 37% of their multimillion-dollar annual incomes in federal taxes.)

The administration’s harsh immigration policies and rhetoric play to the xenophobia exhibited by the minority of the public who see foreigners of races and ethnicities other than white native-born Americans as threats to their way of life.

Some of that surfaced in online comments after the Brewers’ two Venezuelan stars were interviewed on TV broadcasts of the NLCS games and spoke in Spanish, which was translated to English  by an interpreter. The social media postings found fault with players paid to play the all-American game of baseball for failing to speak the American language.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sportswriter Lori Nickel cleared the air on that with a story reporting that both players speak English but choose their native language in TV interviews to ensure their answers are precise. Contreras and Chourio are bilingual, a distinction that fewer than 10% of native-born Americans can claim.

There is, of course, no real danger that Contreras and Chourio, though they exemplify the vulnerability of immigrants and visa holders in the deportation campaign, are going to be sent home. Even the  anti-immigrant extremists in the federal government should be able to figure out that you don’t mess with an army of rabid Milwaukee Brewers fans who have cheered for their star catcher and outfielder all the way to the World Series.