Law enforcement’s use of stadiums to terrorize the working class is nothing new
Dodger Stadium (an LA28 Olympic venue) made national headlines last month when autonomous community members and grassroots rapid response networks observed hundreds of federal agents using the surrounding parking lots as a processing and staging area for ICE’s continued raids and kidnappings. Mainstream media parroted the Dodgers’ own claim that ICE was denied entry, and the organization has since pledged a measly $1 million towards financial assistance for families of immigrants impacted by recent events in the region.
The story serves as the latest example in a long legacy of LA stadiums, often built with public funds and dressed in civic pride, instead repeatedly used as instruments of repression against Black, brown, and immigrant communities.
For decades, these venues have been quietly transformed into launchpads for police raids, mass arrests, and immigration operations, as well as forces of displacement.
In the late 1980s, LAPD unleashed a campaign of racial terror called Operation Hammer. Branded as a crackdown on gang violence, Operation Hammer involved rounding up and arresting thousands of Black and Latino youth, often on minor or nonexistent charges. The LA Memorial Coliseum, the same site that hosted the 1984 Olympics Opening Games, was repurposed into a temporary processing center during the operation. Arrestees were bussed to the Coliseum and held in makeshift detention zones before being filtered into the county jail system.
The Coliseum became emblematic of a city willing to deploy its resources and public infrastructure against its most vulnerable residents.
Police returned to the same playbook decades later during the summer of 2020, when uprisings erupted across the country after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Tens of thousands of Angelenos across the city flooded the streets demanding an end to systemic racism. Gavin Newsom and then-mayor Eric Garcetti asked that the National Guard be brought in to quash the uprising, who alongside the LAPD used the LA Convention Center (the LA28 ping-pong venue) as a staging area.
LAPD responded to the uprising with typical brute force. Over 2,000 people were arrested (many for defying an unlawful curfew) and taken to the parking lot of Jackie Robinson Stadium at UCLA, a parcel of land originally gifted to the US government to house disabled veterans but instead illegally leased to the University.
Protesters, many of them students, were handcuffed for hours on buses, without water, food, or access to bathrooms, and later released into the night without access to any resources.
The use of Jackie Robinson Stadium as a holding site displays the same university complicity we’ve seen in the recent Palestine encampments across the country.
Not even a year later, 400 police officers descended on Echo Park Lake’s homeless population and their allies in an unhinged frenzy of police brutality.
The 2021 Echo Park Lake eviction, an unannounced police raid which displaced 40+ unhoused community members at the direction of then-city council member Mitch O’Farrell, saw Dodger’s Stadium used as a police staging area, just as CBP used the stadium last month in their efforts to detain our undocumented community.
Whether a revealing contradiction, like a stadium named for a civil rights hero being used as a detention site for people demanding justice, or a historical repetition, like a stadium that originally displaced the historic immigrant neighborhoods of Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop now being used to bolster terror on today’s immigrant community, these venues are not neutral.
They are publicly funded institutions that repeatedly become tools of the carceral state—especially during moments of crisis or dissent.
