“Trump’s America wants colour in the stadium, not in the streets.”
The Olympic Games are supposed to stand for peace, dignity, and international cooperation. That’s the line the International Olympic Committee (IOC) repeats whenever it finds itself on the back foot. Like now, as it prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles while ICE agents snatch people off the streets and the federal government turns a major US city into a staging ground for racialised policing.
There is a word for this. Not contradiction. Collaboration.
Los Angeles is already being transformed. The Games may be three years off, but the remodelling has begun. The city isn’t being readied for athletes, it’s being pacified for investors. The swap meet stalls in Boyle Heights, the street vendors in MacArthur Park, the backyard mechanics and bootleg cumbia nights. This is the real engine of LA. It’s where struggle, hustle, and solidarity live. But it doesn’t photograph well. So it’s being zoned out, priced out, swept out. What’s being built in its place is a city of glossy surfaces and soft policing. A simulation of diversity, emptied of all tension and grit. A playground for brands, draped in murals no one local asked for.
Already, entire neighbourhoods look like ghost towns, as ICE and federal forces rip through working-class areas, shuttering small businesses and clearing streets in broad daylight. A recent CNN report described parts of South Central and East LA as “eerily quiet,” the result of targeted immigration raids and heavy National Guard presence. This is not some future dystopia. It’s the prelude.
Ghosts of 1984
The last time LA hosted the Olympics was 1984. Reagan was in the White House, the Soviet Union boycotted, and the city wrapped itself in optimism and national pride. There were still police raids, still gentrification in the wings, but the atmosphere was different. The Games were a Cold War performance, a pageant of American openness. Now, that theatre has curdled. In 1984, LA sold itself as a multicultural dream. In 2028, it’s a holding cell.
Today’s Olympic preparations aren’t about projecting freedom. They’re about enforcing order. The LA28 Games have already been designated a “National Special Security Event,” a bureaucratic phrase that quietly hands control of the city over to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the militarised wing of the federal state. Local officials can protest, but they’re effectively sidelined. Security trumps sovereignty. In the name of keeping the Games “safe,” the federal government is constructing a legal architecture to raid homes, arrest protestors, and surveil entire communities. Which are disproportionately poor, Black, and Brown.
ICE isn’t operating in the shadows. It’s staging dominance. Helicopters overhead. Armoured vehicles in residential streets. The LA Times reported last month that DHS agents refused to coordinate with the city before carrying out mass raids. Even LAPD leadership was left out. The Olympics have become the state’s excuse to treat the city as occupied territory.
Fortress America, Live on Camera
The Olympic Charter claims to celebrate “human diversity in all its richness.” But the reality on the ground in LA reveals the tension (if not outright contradiction) between that ideal and the ethno-nationalist vision being enforced by Trump’s second-term administration. The Games are supposed to be about a world in motion: different flags, different bodies, different languages, different coloured faces. But the state overseeing them wants the opposite, a closed system, locked borders, a racialised hierarchy in everything but name.
What the IOC is helping to build isn’t just a venue for competition. It’s a sanitised stage for a whitewashed fantasy. They want the flags, the costumes, the spectacle. Not the lives behind them.
“What the IOC is helping to build is a sanitised stage for a whitewashed fantasy.”
Chair of LA28 Casey Wasserman recently assured journalists that “America will be open and accepting to all 209 countries.” But who is “America” in this sentence? And who does it welcome? Entry for athletes is one thing. A welcoming city for workers, migrants, protestors, and local communities is another. Trump’s America wants colour in the stadium, not in the streets. You can be from anywhere. Just don’t stay.
Capital, Not Competition
Let’s drop the illusion. The Olympics were never just about sport. They are about capital. Contracts. Construction. Surveillance tech. Infrastructure leveraged through federal grants. LA’s access to $3.2 billion in transport funding is directly tied to its compliance with Olympic logistics. Meaning its compliance with ICE, with the NSSE designation, with the full weight of the security state. Mayors and city officials can protest all they like, but the logic is baked in: no obedience, no money.
This isn’t unique to LA. It’s the pattern of every Olympic host in the neoliberal era: from London’s missile batteries in 2012 to Rio’s favela clearances in 2016. The IOC partners with power—whoever holds it. Today, that means Trump, ICE, and a network of private contractors and state forces building the most fortified Olympics yet.
A Real Movement Would Boycott
If the Olympic Games can only take place inside a militarised zone where local communities are displaced, activists arrested, and migrants terrorised, then they should not take place at all. But the IOC has no interest in disruption. It wants the façade, the spectacle, the sponsorship deals. The performance must go on.
The task, then, falls to athletes, unions, and organisers: to expose what the Olympics have become. Not a celebration of humanity, but a sanitised pageant of soft authoritarianism. Plastered in corporate slogans and guarded by men in tactical gear. The five rings no longer represent global unity. They are the branded chains of a city held under watch.
