Dodgers’ Dicey Relationship With Immigration Law
By Joe Guzzardi
For an organization that the Federal Bureau of Investigation once probed for possible Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations regarding their involvement with human traffickers and document forgers, the Los Angeles Dodgers have adopted high-and-mighty airs. Since no legal avenue exists to travel from communist Cuba to the United States, the Department of Justice wondered how, in 2012, the Dodgers managed to get outfielder Yasiel Puig to Los Angeles.
Sports Illustrated, in a weekly magazine article titled “Inside the Underbelly,” wrote that it obtained a large dossier of information that was originally provided to the FBI. The dossier included videotapes, photographs, confidential legal briefs, receipts, copies of player visas and passport documents, internal emails, and private communications among franchise executives. The evidence pointed to how smugglers access underground pipelines to ferry prospects from Cuba to Haiti or Mexico—waystations to MLB riches. The Dodgers, with their extensive scouting operations throughout the Caribbean, were prominently featured in the FBI dossier, which described efforts to circumvent federal and MLB laws. Puig, for example, paid Florida businessman Gilberto Suarez $2.5 million from his $42 million Dodgers bonus to help him travel from Mexico, where he had been holed up in a cheap seedy motel, to Los Angeles. The DOJ found evidence of shredded documents and large-scale forgeries. The criminal activity reached its peak when Cuban Jose Abreu testified under oath before a grand jury that, prior to his arrival in Miami from another smuggler’s route through Haiti, he ate his fake passport and washed it down with a Heineken. “I knew I could not arrive in the U.S. with a false passport,” Abreu said before signing his $68 million contract with the Chicago White Sox.
The recent dust-up outside of Dodger Stadium consisted of a relatively small group of malcontents, unemployed agitators, and immigration activists. The gathering was responding to an NBC News report that quoted Eunisses Hernandez, a Los Angeles City Council member, who alleged that she received calls early in the morning stating that “federal agents were staging here at the entrance of Dodger Stadium. We got pictures of dozens of vehicles and dozens of agents.”
The Department of Homeland Security immediately responded to deny that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had plans to take removal action in or around Dodger Stadium. DHS replied via X: “This had nothing to do with the Dodgers. CBP vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement.” In the meantime, the Dodgers boasted that they blocked ICE from entering their grounds.
Prohibiting federal law enforcement from entering and conducting lawful business constitutes a federal crime; “The current policy allows ICE agents to enter public areas without permission.” Independent journalist Ali Bradley provided the backstory, reporting: “CBP teams went to Hollywood Home Depot to make apprehensions. They did, and we’re going to transfer the illegal aliens to transport vans off Sunset Boulevard, but when things escalated outside of Home Depot, they went to an open parking lot at Dodger Stadium to make the consolidated transfer. Agents say no one came over and told them to leave.”
In his book “Baseball Cop: The Dark Side of America’s National Pastime,” Eduardo Dominguez, a decorated Boston police officer, a FBI agent and then a MLB Department of Investigations task force member documented his ongoing efforts to alert MLB executives to the trafficking crimes that brought Cuban players to their teams. Aiding and abetting and human trafficking are federal crimes, and cases could potentially be made against major league teams that sign Cuban players. MLB ignored Dominguez’s warnings but instead attempted to suppress his well-received book’s publication. MLB desperately sought to prevent public access to the book and hired law firm Clare Locke to threaten Dominguez and his publisher with defamation lawsuits if the book were published. Later fired, Dominguez said that he could not understand how MLB was so dismissive of a federal investigation’s findings.
The Dodgers are more than just a baseball team—they are a politically progressive, DEI-focused multibillion-dollar business that acts in what it perceives as its best interests, including misrepresenting what occurred with ICE. MLB operates as a collective $79 billion industry, with the Dodgers representing a $6.9 billion segment of that market. In a word salad announcement, the Dodgers pledged $1 million—an infinitesimal fraction of the team’s value—to assist illegal immigrant families who claim to be adversely affected by ICE operations. The Dodgers and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred maintain in-house legal counsel and have immediate phone call access to the nation’s most experienced outside attorneys. They should rely on that legal expertise to assess the validity of DHS immigration removal operations when they occur.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers’ fan base should recognize the reality of their team’s transformation. The Dodgers are no longer the romanticized “Boys of Summer“–they are multimillion-dollar athletes employed by billionaire corporate executives who show criminal disregard for federal immigration laws.
Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@iffsp.org
