Lest this response be dismissed purely as grumbling from the left, Carlo Calenda, head of centrist Opposition party Azione, is far from overjoyed at ICE’s presence, excoriating it as an “unprepared, violent, out-of-control militia”.
There are divergent accounts as to why ICE is involved in a celebration of global sport in the first place. Attilio Fontana, president of the Lombardy region, suggested that ICE agents would be limited to acting only as bodyguards for JD Vance and Marco Rubio, with the US Vice-President and Secretary of State both due to attend the opening ceremony at the San Siro, before adding ominously: “Be careful not to give them a push or something will happen.”
In this febrile political environment, with even President Donald Trump at pains to mitigate the chaos in Minnesota after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, it would seem wise not to tempt fate.
While ICE sought to clarify that activities would be restricted to its investigations unit vetting risks from “transnational criminal organisations”, the notion of the agency exerting any influence on the Winter Games has sparked horror across Italy. Tens of thousands have signed petitions demanding that ICE operatives be banned from entry, with former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte declaring: “We cannot allow this.”
Just about the only sympathetic noises emanated from Giorgia Meloni’s Government, as Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani shrugged, in an apparent effort at reassurance: “It’s not like the SS are coming.”
If that truly is the only bar ICE has to clear – that it is not on a par with Nazi paramilitaries who orchestrated the worst act of mass murder in human history – then people are right to ask why it has any association with international sport.
Although Fontana has since tried to downplay his initial remarks about ICE offering a personal protective detail for Vance and Rubio, the very idea should be a non-starter. Surely this is the job of the US Secret Service? When Ivanka Trump visited the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018 during her father’s first term, she was surrounded at US curling matches by hordes of Secret Service personnel who had travelled with her to South Korea.
Why would a job undertaken at the Olympics by intensively prepared, highly accomplished professionals be handed to ICE, some of whose deportation officers complete only eight weeks’ training?
A frequent refrain is that ICE acts essentially as Trump’s Praetorian Guard. But a defining feature of the Praetorian Guard was that they were the elite, with only the finest soldiers from the legions selected to shield the Roman emperor. The sheer speed of ICE’s expansion, by contrast, has created the impression of a dangerously amateurish set-up, with only rudimentary training given to officers who, in the eyes of as many as 60% of Americans in one poll, are administering excessive force.
In Europe, the distressing scenes in Minneapolis have created even more of a perception problem, with ICE’s mooted contribution in Milan prompting the mayor to lament: “This is a militia that kills. Can’t we just say no to Trump for once?”
The sheer ferocity of the Italian reaction, at odds with the Meloni Administration’s efforts to remain cordial with Trump, highlights how far, and how fast, the United States’ reputation abroad is deteriorating. You are seeing more frequent expressions of this in sport: when the NBA circus pitched up in London earlier this month for the Memphis Grizzlies’ match against the Orlando Magic, a pre-match rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner was interrupted by a cry of “Leave Greenland Alone”. The protest drew a round of applause from several sections of the crowd.
It was far from an isolated incident. Canadian basketball and ice hockey fans have roundly booed the US anthem over the past year, indignant at Trump’s escalating tariff war and repeated threats to turn their country into the “51st state”. Even the normally loyal Fox News has released a poll showing that fewer than a quarter of Americans consider ICE’s tactics “about right”.
And yet the louder the indignation, the greater the determination of more hawkish Trump disciples to use sport as a political tool. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem has been enthusiastic about seizing on next weekend’s Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California for another ICE crackdown, vowing: “We’ll be all over that place.”
The drumbeats ahead of the men’s football World Cup in June and July, with 78 of the 104 matches to be staged in the US, are alarming. When the Department of Homeland Security posted last year that it was “suited and booted” in readiness for the tournament, Alex Lasry, chief executive of the New York-New Jersey host committee, contacted the White House to express concern about the belligerent tone.
Subsequent developments have only deepened unease on this side of the Atlantic. With Italians bristling at what they regard as ICE overreach, Danes in uproar about Trump’s designs on Greenland and even Sepp Blatter arguing that there are legitimate anxieties about the World Cup going to the US at all, opposition is hardening against today’s chilling realities in the land of the free.
