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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

The Reality Of The Housing Crisis

By Joe Guzzardi

For stumping political candidates, vowing to build affordable housing remains one of their biggest rallying cries. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris promised three million new housing units over four years, along with tax incentives and $25,000 down payment assistance for first-time buyers. Harris also proposed a whopping $40 billion innovation fund that would empower local governments to fund and support community solutions for housing construction.

When she made her campaign promise, Harris had been hearing about affordable housing from her Democratic peers for more than 20 years. In 2002, then-California Governor Gray Davis signed a package of bills designed to address the state’s housing crisis. Davis promised that the package would provide “new, affordable housing being built all across the state. More families will have the American dream of home ownership within their grasp.” Two decades later, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a 56-bill package that he said would “incentivize and reduce barriers to housing and support the development of more affordable homes.” As of April 30, 2025, Newsom’s vision for the California home market remained deeply flawed, with a median sale price of $910,000 for houses on that date.

Governors Janet Mills of Maine, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, and Maura Healey of Massachusetts have all bemoaned home shortages and signed multi-million-dollar bills they hope will solve the problem of high housing demand and limited supply. Healey signed the Affordable Homes Act, which authorized $5.2 billion to be spent on housing over the next five years and established 50 policy initiatives to counter rising prices. Fifty policy initiatives may be overkill—too many cooks spoil the broth. As Edward Pinto, senior fellow and co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, noted, it’s “much, much harder” for the government to pass “supply-side proposals” compared with efforts that generate demand by making home-buying easier for consumers. Pinto concluded that Harris’s plan was worse than doing nothing.

Then-candidate and former President Donald Trump also discussed ways to increase housing supply as part of his presidential campaign proposals. “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction,” Trump said in an August 15 press conference. “We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”

Since President Trump’s election, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced plans to identify federal lands where affordable housing could be built. Turner and Burgum will launch the Joint Task Force on Federal Land for Housing to find underutilized lands for residential development and to streamline the process of transferring lands for housing use.

In their Wall Street Journal op-ed, they promoted the plans as a way to increase housing supply and lower costs for Americans. They wrote:

    “Working together, our agencies can take inventory of underused federal properties, transfer or lease them to states or localities to address housing needs, and support the infrastructure required to make development viable—all while ensuring affordability remains at the core of the mission.”

The Interior Department oversees more than 500 million acres of federal land, and the department contends that much of it is suitable for residential use. However, implementation would likely take decades, if it happens at all. Most of the developable land is in western states like California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, and Colorado, said Bureau of Land Management Director Jon Raby. The lands vary widely, ranging from deserts and grasslands to mountains and forests. Moreover, most of the federal government’s land—whether west or east—lacks the required water and sewage infrastructure to support new communities. Environmental groups are concerned that development will adversely affect wildlife habitat. As BLM’s Raby noted, “People love their public lands. Every acre is important to somebody.”

Nowhere in HUD or DOI’s planning is a commitment to scrutinize sustainability. The constant factor in affordable housing is population growth. With more than one million legal immigrants admitted annually and chain migration—which allows each immigrant to petition for an average of three non-nuclear family members who can eventually petition their own families—housing developments, even those built in remote areas, will eventually be overwhelmed. Reducing the number of people competing for existing affordable housing would automatically create more of this elusive commodity.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguuzzardi@ifspp.org

The Reality Of The Housing Crisis