Mets fans balk at ICE ad onslaught during games

It’s easy in times like these to find yourself sucked more into the relatively comforting world of sports for escape. Sure the Mets are sputtering through a maddening late-season collapse, but even when the team is at risk of being washed out into Flushing Bay, there is a joy in tuning in to the broadcast anyway: the radio broadcast has one of the best voices in the business, the TV booth is a trio of erudite personalities, and the production of the broadcast itself just won an Emmy for the cinematic, boundary-pushing work of its director. It’s a pretty good TV show. 

The worst part by far, for any trying to maintain sanity, is the commercials: you get an endless barrage of the same handful of Citi Bank or Geico ads for nine innings straight, enough to make you lunge for the mute button every half inning. Now the commercials have taken a true dark turn: the broadcasts over the past month have been filled with recruitment ads for Immigration and Custom Enforcement, enticing fans to join up and catch “the worst of the worst” with bonuses of “up to” $50,000. The ads have been seen on SNY, the Mets’ cable home, and on WPIX11, which broadcasts games throughout the year; as well as heard on radio broadcasts, and seen elsewhere nationwide, including during local NFL broadcasts.

“It was very jarring,” one longtime Mets fan in Brooklyn told The Groove of a radio ad that surprised him. “You’re listening to a Mets game and zoning out and trying not to think about politics. It’s very much just like the Kool-Aid man just bursting through the wall and jumping into my brain.”

ICE Commercial During MLB Game
byu/SoSpiffandSoKlean inEyesOnIce

You can see complaints about it all over social media too, with fans noting that the ads are a particular stick in the eye to the fanbase — based in the most diverse big county in the country — as they hang on through the team’s slouch toward a possible postseason bid. (For what it’s worth, ICE ads are reportedly appearing during Yankees broadcasts too, but the furor online is much less prevalent among fans of the Bronx team). 

“The Mets suck, and SNY has sunk so low we're seeing ads for ICE,” one wrote on Reddit. “Let's boycott SNY and The Mets until this disgusting propaganda stops.” 

The Mets or NFL teams don’t directly control the ads that appear along their games. And to be sure, football and baseball are plenty fascist-coded on their own, though usually just through the occasional military flyover, performance of mandatory anthem patriotism or regrettable tweets from a young pitcher. The appearance of the Verhoeven-ian ads, part of ICE’s nationwide ad blitz, has been a shocking turn for fans, even those who admit they’re willing to ignore the many boot-licking controversies of the NFL for a few hours.

“You’re enjoying your Sunday afternoon despite all the news out there reminding you how horrible everything is. Your team scores a touchdown. Cut to [Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi] Noem telling you ‘here’s a $50,000 signing bonus with your mask and jackboots’ and the vibes are instantly ruined,” one NFL fan in Brooklyn told me. “It feels like sports is supposed to be the one arena of entertainment that both sides of the aisle can enjoy equally. It’s an invasion of that space.” 

‘Robbing Peter to pay Paul’

The complaints about ICE ads are not just from the subset of Mets fans in hats like this. The ads don’t make a ton of sense even if you’re a Long Island law-and-order guy. 

The commercials are targeted specifically at existing law enforcement, ostensibly asking them to quit their jobs protecting local communities and join Donald Trump’s face-hiding stormtrooper squad to do the important work of arresting 7-year-olds and kidnapping legal students who write newspaper editorials. This nationwide recruitment effort has inflamed local law enforcement officials across the country, who have been struggling with recruitment for years. 

"It is tone-deaf and reflects a total lack of judgment and character on their part," Jonathan Thompson, executive director and CEO of the National Sheriff's Association, told USA Today. "This is either galactically stupid or purposefully malicious. You're just robbing Peter to pay Paul. And in this case, you're robbing the poorest of Peter to pay the richest of Paul."

So Trump’s government might not believe in defunding the police, but they certainly seem ready to destaff them. The messaging in the ICE ads on radio and TV is a blunt appeal to the hyper macho, jackboot mindset: your local law enforcement job, and its many codes of conduct and civilian review boards, has gotten too woke. Join ICE and you can really let loose, and finish the job. You could even get some student loan forgiveness — a thing Republicans used to hate. It’s an invitation to dress up like a guy who used to dress up like Superman and play tough guy. 

The ads promise a chance to go after predators, drug traffickers and gang members — but local ICE agents have actually spent a lot of their time going after teens without criminal records, violating due process and keeping people in inhumane conditions. 

As for going after “the worst of the worst," it turns out going all-in on scorched-earth ICE raids across the country has already pulled law enforcement away from other crime. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the focus on rounding up immigrants has taken federal agents away from drug traffic operations. As a result, cocaine distribution is up, the price of cocaine available in the United States is dropping and consumption is growing. (And who says the kids don’t party anymore.) The prioritization of Trump wish-fulfillment echoes the reports that FBI agents were pulled off active cases to redact the Epstein files.

Snitch culture  

Representatives for WPIX 11 and its parent company did not respond to requests for comment; representatives for SNY responded but were unable to provide a comment by press time. (We’ll update the story with any comment we receive.)

The ads feel like the latest part of the whiny snitch culture that the current administration is built upon, asking aggrieved members of law enforcement to turn even more aggrieved and start going after their fellow sports fans. It’s troublesome for local baseball particularly, which attracts a wide array of fans, from Queens punks to Syosset car dealership owners; but also plenty of diehards from Latin American countries, whom ICE agents can now freely target. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration, saying ICE has the right to stop and question someone just because they are speaking Spanish, putting much of the fan base at risk of being mistakenly shipped to a foreign prison, by a government that hates to admit it made a mistake. 

In response to intense public pressure, the Los Angeles Dodgers pledged $1 million in aid to families affected by ICE raids this summer. The Mets, Yankees and our local NFL teams have made no such moves yet. 

To think of sports as totally apolitical would be silly and willfully ignorant, especially as political ads rife with weird anti-trans messaging were all over broadcasts in the fall (still, those ads only foretold a possible nonsense future of a second Trump administration, not a constant reminder that we are thickly living among its dumbest and meanest altered reality every day). It also puts one at risk of aligning ideologically with the kind of “shut up and dribble” messages targeted to NBA players who have any political opinions at all. 

But the ICE ads bring an inherently thuggish message that beseech you to turn against your neighbors to fulfill the fantasies of a decaying manchild in the White House playing with his toy tough guy action figures to target his favorite scapegoat, no matter what the actual crime data say. They want you to put on a neck gaiter and throw your fellow sports fan up against the wall under suspicion of pronouncing “quesadilla” a little too correctly at the concession stand, all for a reported starting salary of $23 an hour (and a five year commitment to get that $50,000 signing bonus too). 

The ads are hitting baseball fans for the reason that everything hits harder right now: the creeping fascism is hard to ignore, even in the supposedly escapist world of sports. It gets harder and harder to hide in the TV, as institutions cower before conservative insistence that it's illegal to be mean to them, while the masks come off (and the pro-racism hats come on), showing how easy it was to topple everything into a hard right direction with just a slight push. 

The idea that anyone would boycott SNY during a Mets run to the World Series seems unlikely. You might reach for the remote to mute the ads when the Geico Gecko appears on your screen for the 60th time in the game. But when ICE says they’re after the worst of the worst, it might be smart to pay attention to who's listening.

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