The International Olympic Committee was forced to ask fans not to boo the U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio during Friday’s opening ceremony for the Milano Cortina Winter Games.
The Department of Homeland Security sparked an international outcry last week when it confirmed that members of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit would help provide security for the Games.
Italians have been shocked by images of ICE and Border Patrol agents pepper-spraying protesters, breaking into people’s homes, arresting children, and shooting and killing U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, sparking protests, petitions, and demands from opposition lawmakers that Trump’s “thugs” be denied entry to Italy.
During a press conference Wednesday, IOC President Kirsty Coventry was asked whether, given the “geopolitical backdrop” of the Games and local anger over the role of ICE, she thought it would be understandable if Americans were jeered during the opening ceremony.
“I hope that the opening ceremony is seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful of each other,” she said, before describing visiting the Olympic village and seeing athletes interacting from all walks of life.
“No one is asking what country they come from or what religion. They are all just hanging out,” she said. “It was a real opportunity to put into perspective how we could all be. And so, for me, I hope that the opening ceremony will do that and will be a reminder for everyone how we could be.”
ICE, incidentally, has done just the opposite with its indiscriminate sweeps in American cities, where agents are stopping people based on their perceived ethnicity, language, and job description.
Vance and Rubio arrived Thursday in Milan, a city that despite the U.S. government’s best attempts to quell the furor, remains opposed to the agents’ presence.
“Obviously, ICE does not conduct immigration enforcement operations in foreign countries,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Italy, billionaire Tilman Fertitta, has further emphasized that HSI agents are ICE’s investigative branch.
He assured the Italian government the agents would work out of a single room in the U.S. Consulate where they will “mostly consult their own databases” and provide support to other security teams, the Italian Interior Ministry said in a statement.
But in a country where Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirt squads are still very much a part of the collective memory, many Italians were not persuaded by the distinction between the “operational” and the “investigative” arm of ICE.
“This is a militia that kills. It’s a militia that signs its own permits to enter people’s house, like we signed our own permission slips at school, except it’s much more serious,” Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala said last week during a radio broadcast. “They’re not welcome in Milan. Can’t we just say ‘no’ to Trump for once?”
Thousands of protesters gathered Saturday at the city’s Piazza 25 Aprile, which is named for the day in 1945 that Italy was liberated from the Nazis, to oppose ICE at the Olympics and to sound the alarm over what many see as the dismantling of American democracy.
The news of ICE’s attendance came as tensions between the U.S. and Europe were already at an all-time high after the president threatened to invade Greenland and effectively destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization last month, leading to another possible point of contention during the Games.
