Keeping ICE Out of the World Cup with Paola Mendoza

The World Cup is supposed to be a time when billions of people across the planet join together to celebrate their love for the global game of soccer. It’s a moment for people of different ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, and nationalities to celebrate what brings them closer, and to enjoy the world’s most popular sport.

But President Trump has other ideas. He used the World Cup to bully, divide, spread fear in immigrant communities, and even demand special treatment from the tournament’s governing body. On this episode, we speak with Paola Mendoza, author of the books Sanctuary and Solis and one of the organizers of the No ICE in the Cup campaign. The campaign is a national call to action demanding the World Cup remain joyful, safe and secure for all to enjoy.

No ICE in the Cup also makes clear that ICE – that’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – has no place near the World Cup festivities.

Please download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way. It will help more people find this podcast.

Resources

No ICE in the CUP campaign page

Paola’s website

Paola’s books: Sanctuary and Solis

Previous episode on politics in sports: Trans Athletes, Trump, and the Right to Play Sports

Transcript

Paola: [00:00:00] What happens after July 19th, which is when the World cup ends? Do we go back to how we were on June 10th and allow the federal government and the fear of ICE to take away who we are? Or does the country rally around immigrants and say, “No, back off. This is who we are. This is who we want to be.”

Simon: This is Rights This Way, a podcast from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of New York State. I’m Simon McCormack, editorial manager at the NYCLU and your host for this podcast, your best listen for the civil rights and liberties issues that impact New Yorkers most.

The World Cup is supposed to be a time when billions of people across the planet join together to celebrate their love for the global game of soccer. It’s a moment for people of different ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, [00:01:00] and nationalities to celebrate what brings them closer and to enjoy the world’s most popular sport.

But President Trump had other ideas. He used the World Cup to bully, divide, spread fear in immigrant communities, and even demand special treatment from the tournament’s governing body. On this episode, we’ll speak with Paola Mendoza, author of the books Sanctuary and Solís, and one of the organizers of the No Ice in the Cup campaign.

The campaign is a national call to action demanding the World Cup remain joyful, safe, and secure for all to enjoy. No Ice in the Cup also makes clear that ICE, that’s US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, has no place near the World Cup festivities. We’ll get started in just a second, but first I’d like to ask you to please download, rate, review, and subscribe to Rights This Way.

It will help more people find this podcast. Before we get started, just a quick note that outside guests on this show do not represent the NYCLU, and their views are their own. And now I’m [00:02:00] joined by Paola Mendoza, author of the books Sanctuary and Solís, and organizer of the No Ice in the Cup campaign.

Paola, welcome to Rights This Way.

Paola: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.

Simon: Yeah. We’re very happy to have you. And I guess I’ll just start with, just kind of, a table-setting question: Can you explain what No Ice in the Cup is?

Paola: Yes. No Ice in the Cup obviously is inspired by the World Cup, and it’s a campaign and initiative that is demanding that ICE stay out of the World Cup.

It is being spearheaded by an organization called Horizons Project. But it is part of a much larger big-tent movement that Horizons Project spearheads, which is a cross-sectoral, cross-ideological group of people and organizations that have been working together for over a year now [00:03:00] with the goal and mission to save democracy in the United States.

And No Ice in the Cup falls within that goal because obviously ICE is the farthest thing from democratic institution when it is terrorizing and murdering people that are both here as citizens, as visitors, and as undocumented immigrants.

Simon: And what made you wanna get involved in this campaign?

Paola: So I am an immigrant.

I came to this country from Colombia, which is why I’m repping my Colombia World Cup jersey, even though we lost. And I grew up as an immigrant in this country and had both the beauty and the challenges of everything that that entails. When I decided that I wanted to be an artist, I knew that the stories that I was going to tell was and were the stories of immigrants.

And I had a very clear vision of how I wanted those stories to feel regardless of what I told, how I told them, what the [00:04:00] stories were. I wanted the stories to be full of dignity and love and care. I wanted my immigrant characters to be allowed to be flawed because we as human beings are flawed.

And I wanted all of those things because I grew up in a time when the stories of immigrants around me were the opposite of that, and I felt very erased in the narrative of this country. I felt my mother’s story was very erased in the narrative of this country, even though I knew that her story and our story was central to the experiment and the success of this country.

So I have spent my adult life with the great honor to tell the stories of immigrants. And obviously in the past, I mean since 2016, since Donald Trump announced his election, but long before that, but really got amped up in 2016, the divisiveness and the vitriol of the stories of immigrants and immigrants as a whole, as a population, started to rupture [00:05:00] here in this country.

And in 2026, what we saw and what we’ve lived through is the violence that the state has committed on immigrants in this country and not just immigrants, but people who, quote unquote, “look like immigrants” or what this administration has said immigrants are, which are Black and Brown people and Asian folks.

And so with that violence and with that terror, what we needed to do was push back and fight back, and Minneapolis showed us how to do that. They showed us a definitive blueprint on how to push back on the administration. And so with the World Cup coming to the United States, obviously we knew that this was an important moment to make a stand, to make a clear stand against ICE, against fascism, against violence from the state, and tell people, our people, immigrant communities, that they are not alone, that there are groups of people that are standing up for them, that there are groups of people that are fighting back.

And many of us may not remember this, but [00:06:00] previous to the World Cup actually arriving, the Trump administration kept on threatening that ICE was going to be at the stadiums, on the streets, at watch parties, that they were going to be rounding up people. And what we saw was a mass mobilization of various sectors of the United States civic society, artists, individuals, organizations coming together and saying absolutely not.

And the ICE machinery, the violence of ICE did not come to the World Cup as was initially planned and announced by the administration, and I think that’s because of how we mobilized. Unfortunately, what we have seen is that ICE has continued to ramp up their campaign of terror, not focused on the World Cup, but rather on communities all across the country.

Last week it was announced that they had arrested and detained over 10,000 people, I think it was in three or four days. Astronomical numbers, and those numbers represent fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, students, professionals that are [00:07:00] being disappeared by the state.

Simon: That kind of leads me to a question.

I’m curious what you think… Like, as you mentioned, Trump had big, big plans for how to terrorize the World Cup, and I’m curious if, one, you could kind of talk about those in a little bit of detail. You definitely touched on it there in your previous answer, but, one, just a little bit of what he was kind of saying at the time, because I really have not seen any coverage of anything related to ICE activity around the World Cup, but I certainly may have missed something.

I’m just curious if you have a sense of, like, have the Trump administration and ICE been able to do anything around those events or is it, as you said, they’ve been focusing elsewhere and, as you said, ramping up arrests across the country elsewhere?

Paola: So the Trump administration’s threats to the World Cup were vague enough that it was uncertain what they were going to do, but clear enough that we all thought that they were going to do something.

They said that they were going to be at the stadiums, that they were going to be [00:08:00] providing security at the stadiums, that they were going to be in airports, that they were going to be in watch parties, that they were going to be on the streets. And as we’ve seen, and I know that the United States is not a country that understands fully the scope of soccer and what soccer and how we watch soccer around the world and in different communities, but watch parties are a big part of watching the World Cup.

You see it all over the world, thousands of people gathering outside to watch, to experience, to be together, to be in community, to celebrate the countries. And so for those of us that knew what those watch parties were going to possibly be like, the idea that ICE would be roaming the streets and going into those watch parties was terrifying.

And, you know, No ICE in the Cup started to work with small businesses to educate them on their rights around making sure that their patrons inside of the space were safe. We worked with various organizations across the country to educate people. We had [00:09:00] lawyers on call for different small businesses.

We had small businesses that pledged this idea of a welcome standard, which was that they were the simple, the most simple version of that is that they were going to be welcoming to people, anyone that was in their stores. And so we really wanted to push back on this narrative and the possibility of ICE being on the streets and in stadiums, in hotels, by educating people, inspiring people to be both courageous and brave should something happen, and really letting people know that they were not alone.

I think what has been extraordinary, there’s been many extraordinary things about this World Cup, but here specifically in the United States is, and lots of people are talking about this online, is that for the past, what, almost four weeks, the World Cup opened June 11th, so for the past four weeks, it has been acceptable once again to wear our jerseys from the countries that [00:10:00] we are from, to be proud of the countries that we come from, whether it’s because we’re first generation, second generation, third generation, to be in celebration of other cultures, to have cross-cultural connections, to be welcoming to the other at a time where four weeks previous to this, before June 11th, people were scared to speak Spanish walking down the street.

People were scared to let people know around them that they themselves were immigrants or that their parents were immigrants. There was so much fear that was brought by the federal government onto the people that it had quieted on the outside the reality of who and what this country is, which is a country of immigrants.

And so these past four weeks have allowed us to remember who are the pride and the joy and the positivity that it actually is to be an immigrant or [00:11:00] to be of immigrant descent in this country. And so I see this moment in time as a crossroads.

What happens after July 19th, which is when the World Cup ends? Do we go back to how we were on June 10th and allow the federal government and the fear of ICE to take away who we are? Or does the country rally around immigrants? Does the country rally around the positivity, the beauty, the necessity of what it is to be an immigrant in this country and say, “No, back off. This is who we are. This is who we want to be.”

And you see it around the world. I can, you know, I could take this concept and this idea around the world, and we see this all around the world. Left to our own devices, we in the United States are people, I firmly believe this, that is welcoming, that understands that multiculturalism, that diversity is a positive, [00:12:00] beautiful, necessary thing.

When those that are in power use fear, manipulation, lies to take that away from us, we as a general we, not me as an individual, but we, this country, turns against itself, turns against its better self, turns against the people that are foundational to this country, turns against my mother, who I firmly believe is the fabric of this country.

I know her to be that. And so I just hope that as they say, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle, that we remember this is the aspirational we. This is what we need to be fighting for.

Simon: We’ll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, if you’ve been enjoying the podcast and want to support our work, check out our merch store at shop.nyclu.org.

We have a great selection of items perfect for listeners like you. [00:13:00] Our store line lets you tell the world what you think and who you support, whether you’re marching in the streets or arguing about politics with your extended family. And right now, you can get 20% off your order with promo code PODCAST20.

That’s 20% off with promo code PODCAST20 at shop.nyclu.org. Thanks, and now back to the show.

And what have been some of your favorite moments from the No Ice In The Cup campaign? I’m thinking things like, you know, favorite posters, favorite people you’ve met. You know, you’ve talked broadly about, you know, some of the outcomes pushing back and seemingly pushing out ICE and Trump from these World Cup festivities and changing, as you said, changing the ethos and the ability to still have pride in where you come from and to speak the language from the country that you’re from.

But I’m curious if you have any specific examples you kind of wanna highlight from the campaign?

Paola: Yeah. So one of the beautiful things that No Ice in the Cup did is that we started to work with [00:14:00] artists from the very beginning of the campaign. From an organizing perspective, I’m more of a cultural organizer, and I’ve been doing that for over a decade now.

And what’s central to me about that cultural organizing is that we work and we organize with artists from the very, very beginning, not what tends to happen in movement, which is organizers organize something and in the last 48 hours they bring in an artist to do something and it’s all very fast, and the artist isn’t compensated well, and the artist doesn’t have enough time to do the thing that they really do, and they are just, they’re work-for-hire to do a thing.

Rather than building an actual initiative/campaign with the artist as a central component to that campaign, I think it makes such a difference. And so what we did with No Ice in the Cup is, there was a group of about seven of us, all artists, that came together with the idea, we knew we had the tagline No Ice in the Cup, and so we had to build out what we were going to do with No Ice in the Cup.

And one of the verticals that we built out [00:15:00] was to commission 11 artists from the 11 host cities in the United States, and just give them the tagline, the title, No Ice in the Cup. And what we ended up getting was 11 unique, beautiful, diverse pieces of artwork, made from all over the country that had their own beautiful interpretation of what No Ice in the Cup was.

And so those, all of that artwork lives on our website, noiceinthecup.us. It’s all downloadable, so individuals can download it for their own watch parties or take it out to a protest or remix it however they want, do wheatpasting in their cities. It really was just left open as a tool for individuals and people, organizations to do with what they want.

So I think that’s one of the most beautiful things that was inspired by No Ice in the Cup in supporting all of those artists. The other thing that we did is we hosted various soccer tournaments across the country in various cities to bring people together to [00:16:00] stand in community and say and believe and say the statement, clearly and proudly, No Ice in the Cup.

And so I organized a youth soccer tournament here in Brooklyn, and we had about 30 kids from mixed-status families, citizens, immigrants, non-immigrants, all the like here in Brooklyn. And these kids played for, like, three, four hours, all with No Ice in the Cup T-shirts, and they had the artwork, and as young people, they were able to talk about what the idea of No Ice in the Cup meant for them, and it was really inspiring to hear 10-year-olds, 11-year-olds, 13-year-olds express why they believe that ICE should stay out of the World Cup as they understood it, because they are both lovers of soccer and also they’re from New York, so immigrants are central to any New Yorker’s experience, in many different ways.

And so that is kind of the two elements of No Ice in the Cup that I really am proud [00:17:00] of.

Simon: Yeah. That’s amazing. And I’m curious if you can think of any sort of particular things that you can take from this experience with this campaign that can inform your other work.

Paola: Yeah. I think, I’m gonna state the obvious here, but I think we’re living in an extraordinarily unique time for a whole host of reasons.

The environment is collapsing around us. AI is rising as we speak. We are all trying to survive and live under fascism. Institutions are collapsing onto themselves. We are both connected and disconnected more than we’ve ever been in our lives, and we’re still processing the realities of what it meant to survive a pandemic and what it means to survive a pandemic.

All of these things are swirling around us that, for the most part, are pretty depressing and disorienting. And we have this moment that comes every four years that is what I believe the most united the world [00:18:00] is ever in various events, right? Like, in the Olympics, which is the next kind of closest thing that we have to it, the passion of the Olympics is spread through all kinds of different sports.

You can be passionate about gymnastics. You can be really, you know, love table tennis. It’s just the passion is dispersed. Here, the passion and the joy and the celebration is all about one thing, and it’s soccer. Obviously, the passion is dispersed through teams, but it’s one thing. It’s soccer. And I have to say, like, I am not a huge athlete.

I’m an artist, so I’m at the opposite end of what it means to be an athlete. But this World Cup, the joy, the community was so desperately needed that I think that we… I soaked it up more than I ever have before in my life. And I think from an organizer, the power of joy and community and celebration is so palpable here, that to lean into that rather than, when we’re [00:19:00] able to, the fear, the sadness, the inevitability of what seems to be the cruelty of the world, we have this other thing, that when given the chance, I think that, we do lean into that.

I’m not being Pollyanna and saying all we have to be is happy and everything will work out. Obviously not. But coming together and organizing in joy rather than coming together and organizing out of pain and trauma, both things are real and must get done and happen, but coming together and organizing around joy feeds the soul.

And we can work through an injustice and terrible things with that power of joy. So I think as an organizer, that is what I’m taking with me. And as a writer, what I am curious about is how this moment, because as I started talking, this is such a unique moment in time, how is this moment… What is the [00:20:00] story of this moment going to be?

How are we going to narrate this history in 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now? I think about the 1932, ’33 Olympics in Germany, obviously the Nazis were rising in Germany, and what that meant, and how Hitler used that to his benefit, and how that story is connected to, obviously, World War II and what Hitler did.

And I think about here in this moment in time, I want the story to be that Donald Trump tried to do that. The fascist that he is, as democracy was crumbling, he tried to use sports to sport-wash what was actually happening in this country at the time, and we, people, not just in the United States, because it’s also all the people that came from various parts of the world, said, “No. No. This moment in time is going to be remembered how the people [00:21:00] fought back with openness, togetherness, kindness, love, joy, the opposite of what the administration was trying to push down our throats.”

Simon: Yeah. Absolutely. And I’m curious if there’s anything you want to keep on folks’ radar that you are or will be working on, could be similar to No Ice in the Cup or anything else, any other projects you want to let people know about.

Paola: I have been contemplating and thinking about fascism for quite some time, so my books, Sanctuary and Solice, are a dystopian futuristic take on the United States that takes place in 1932.

Unfortunately, it’s very similar to the world that we’re living in currently. The books came out in 2020 and in 2024. But I say all of that because at the heart of what those books are is a blueprint on how to fight back. Yes, they’re fiction and they’re fiction imagined worlds, but it is not far off from this world, and the characters that are in those books I hope can be used as inspiration for what we need to do in [00:22:00] the real world in order to fight fascism.

Simon: Perfect. Yeah. And if people are listening and they want to work with you on any of your current or future campaigns, or if they want to just get involved in the things that you’re involved in, what should they do?

Paola: I’m on Instagram, so you can find me on Instagram, my name, @paolamendoza. Also my website, iampaolamendoza.com.

So all of that is a way in which to get in contact with me.

Simon: Well, with that, Paola, thank you so much for coming on Rights This Way.

Paola: Thank you for having me.

Simon: Thank you for listening. You can find more on everything we talked about in this episode by visiting nyclu.org, and you can follow us at NYCLU on YouTube, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Facebook.

Until next time, I’m Simon McCormack. Thank you for fighting with us to deliver more liberty and justice to all New [00:23:00] Yorkers.