Donald Trump posted on Truth Social after the US beat Paraguay 4-1 in their World Cup opener. “Congratulations to Team USA on their Big Win,” he wrote. He did not attend the match. But he has spent the better part of two years trying to dismantle the legal framework that makes that team possible.
Consider what the 2026 World Cup actually is, stripped of the bunting and the Fox Sports graphics: a tournament hosted by a government that spent the months before it detaining players at airports, barring referees at the border, and deploying immigration agents inside the stadiums where the games are played. At the same time, that government’s own national team is arguably the most immigrant-built squad in the tournament. The administration has noticed neither irony nor shame in this.
Start with the team itself. Exactly half of the 26-man USMNT roster holds dual citizenship, per the official US Soccer announcement. Six players were born outside the United States. The striker who opened the scoring against Paraguay — Folarin Balogun — is American for a reason that has nothing to do with intention: his mother Florence, a Nigerian citizen living in London, was seven months pregnant when airline staff blocked her from boarding a return flight in the summer of 2001. She stayed. He was born in Brooklyn. The 14th Amendment made him a citizen. Trump signed an executive order on January 20, 2025, to end that provision. Courts have blocked it; the Supreme Court will rule on it before this tournament is over.
The rest of the roster reads like a document the administration would prefer not to acknowledge. Ricardo Pepi, one of the team’s other strikers, was born in El Paso to Mexican parents — his father working construction jobs from the age of 13, the family living in a trailer in San Elizario. Tim Weah was born in Brooklyn to George Weah — Liberia’s former president and the only African player ever to win the Ballon d’Or — and his Jamaican-American mother. Haji Wright was born in Los Angeles to a Ghanaian father and a Liberian mother. Cristian Roldan’s parents fled civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador in the early 1980s and settled in California; Roldan says he chose to represent the US to “give back to the United States for everything they gave our family.” Goalkeeper Matt Turner holds a Lithuanian passport because his great-grandmother escaped that country during the Holocaust; he discovered the connection through her emigration papers. Sergiño Dest’s father was born in Suriname, came to Brooklyn as a child, became a US citizen, and served in the US Army for 25 years. His son was born in the Netherlands. (
These are not edge cases or asterisks. They are the starting lineup.
Now look at what the administration was doing on the other side of the orange velvet rope. Omar Abdulkadir Artan — Africa’s referee of the year, the first Somali ever appointed to a World Cup — arrived in Miami with a valid US visa that had cleared the State Department’s vetting process. CBP held him for 11 hours, told him nothing, and sent him back to Istanbul on the next available flight. He returned to Mogadishu to a crowd of supporters — a hero’s welcome, in a country whose team wasn’t even in the tournament, for a man who was never allowed to referee a single minute of it.
Iraq’s star striker Aymen Hussein — the man who scored the goal that ended Iraq’s 40-year World Cup absence — was met at O’Hare by agents who held him for seven hours and inspected his phone. The team photographer, Talal Salah, was held for more than ten hours and turned away entirely. No explanation was offered.
Iran’s squad, meanwhile, is not based in the country hosting the tournament at all. They are camped in Tijuana, crossing the border to play and leaving the same day, after the US granted their players visas just ten days before the opener while refusing them to key staff. The Iranian federation called it “political interference in sport in its worst form.”
Fans from four competing nations — Haiti, Ivory Coast, Iran, and Senegal — are banned from entering the US entirely, because Trump declined to temporarily suspend their travel bans for his own tournament.
And then there are the stadiums themselves. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that ICE agents would be deployed at World Cup venues throughout the tournament. When asked whether immigration arrests were off the table, he declined to rule it out: “ICE always says immigration enforcement. We’re always going to do that.” The roughly 2,000 food and beverage workers at SoFi Stadium — the venue hosting the USMNT’s opener — voted 96% in favor of a strike authorization, citing fears of being detained by ICE while serving nachos at a World Cup match. They eventually won a contract that included, for the first time in modern American labor history, an explicit right to walk off the job if federal immigration agents threatened workers’ safety during the tournament. A poll found 65% of Americans opposed ICE’s presence at the stadiums. Trump’s base approved, at 72%.
This is the context in which Trump posted on Truth Social to congratulate “Team USA” on their “Big Win.” He did not attend the match, but he has been photographed with a replica World Cup trophy in the Oval Office and has cultivated a close relationship with FIFA president, Gianni Infantino. The tournament is useful to him as spectacle. The team is useful as a symbol. But no one has pressed the administration on a stark reality: Their new immigration policies will fundamentally alter the team and the spectacle, which would not exist in its current form without the immigration policies he is dismantling.
The 14th Amendment does not care about irony. It made Folarin Balogun an American because his mother happened to be in Brooklyn when he arrived. That accident of geography is now before the Supreme Court, which may rule on it while Balogun is still playing in this tournament. If the administration gets what it wants, children born under the same circumstances in the future will not be citizens. The legal principle that built this team will be gone.
Trump can keep the trophy in the Oval Office. It will remain a monument to his hypocrisy.
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