[Rush Lindell] So, here's what's going on. The World Cup is a weekend and the U.S. government can't get its own story straight on immigration enforcement.
[Rush Lindell] That's where we start today.
[Reagan] The Mullin contradiction is something else.
[Reagan] CBS News had him on record saying ICE would be at stadiums every day and enforcement was always on the table.
[Reagan] Then LA County Sheriff Luna announcing in writing no civil immigration enforcement at any World Cup event.
[Rush Lindell] The Secretary of Homeland Security,
[Rush Lindell] contradicted by a county sheriff in Los Angeles,
[Rush Lindell] let that sit.
[Reagan] It does sit.
[Rush Lindell] And nobody at DHS or the White House has explained how that happened.
[Rush Lindell] That's the first thing we get into today.
[Reagan] And that's not the whole story.
[Reagan] The pressure that produced that truce,
[Reagan] union organizers,
[Reagan] a ninety six per cent strike authorization vote,
[Reagan] Human Rights Watch going after nine-
[Reagan] 19 FIFA sponsors?
[Reagan] That's a story that didn't get a lot of airtime.
[Rush Lindell] Six sponsors responded with vague human rights language.
[Rush Lindell] None endorsed the demand.
[Rush Lindell] Not one.
[Reagan] Tiro for 19.
[Rush Lindell] And then, oh, then there's Iran,
[Rush Lindell] playing their World Cup opener at SoFi Stadium three days ago.
[Rush Lindell] Drew 2-2 with New Zealand.
[Rush Lindell] Great match.
[Rush Lindell] Fans everywhere.
[Rush Lindell] And the moment the final whistle blows,
[Reagan] Ordered out.
[Rush Lindell] ordered out of the country that night.
[Rush Lindell] Al Jazeera confirmed it:
[Rush Lindell] Iran will have to leave the U.S. within hours of every single match.
[Rush Lindell] Captain Taremi said the trip in took five hours of travel and security checks for what's normally a short hop from Tijuana.
[Reagan] Rear to Robbie's visa expired after game one,
[Reagan] quietly fixed by the State Department.
[Rush Lindell] Quietly." That word does a lot of work here.
[Rush Lindell] We'll look at who blinked, whether anybody's legal authority actually changed,
[Rush Lindell] and what
[Speaker 3] the consequences are.
[Rush Lindell] What the media missed asking.
[Reagan] The policy arc goes back four months February to now worth walking through
[Rush Lindell] It is. First segment, the Mullin contradiction.
[Rush Lindell] The timeline,
[Rush Lindell] the sheriff's announcement,
[Rush Lindell] and what DHS still hasn't said publicly.
[Rush Lindell] Stay with us.
[Rush Lindell] Before we dive in,
[Rush Lindell] a quick reminder:
[Rush Lindell] we love hearing from you.
[Rush Lindell] If you have questions or topics you'd like us to cover,
[Rush Lindell] head to the link in the description and submit your question; we read every single one.
[Rush Lindell] So here's what happened.
[Rush Lindell] May twelfth, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin goes on CBS News and says quote ICE always does immigration enforcement.
[Rush Lindell] We're always going to do that.
[Rush Lindell] Agents at World Cup stadiums every single day.
[Rush Lindell] That's the public statement,
[Rush Lindell] on record.
[Reagan] And then,
[Reagan] early June,
[Reagan] L.
[Reagan] a LA County Sheriff Robert Luna holds a press conference.
[Rush Lindell] Right,
[Rush Lindell] and the sheriff says federal officials personally told him:
[Rush Lindell] Personally that ICE will not conduct civil immigration enforcement at any World Cup game or event in Los Angeles,
[Reagan] Wow.
[Rush Lindell] Full stop.
[Reagan] So the Secretary of Homeland Security said one thing,
[Reagan] then the federal officials who talked to the LA Sheriff said something different.
[Reagan] Those can't both be true at the same time.
[Rush Lindell] They cannot and nobody in mainstream media wants to say the word reversal.
[Rush Lindell] They're treating it like a nuanced...
[Rush Lindell] Policy evolution it's not nuanced,
[Rush Lindell] it's a U-turn.
[Reagan] Look,
[Reagan] to be fair,
[Reagan] Mullin also told CBS that agents wouldn't be there to "round up mass individuals," so there was always some ambiguity baked in.
[Rush Lindell] Ambiguity,
[Rush Lindell] that's generous.
[Rush Lindell] The man posted a video on the ICE agency's own X account saying agents would be out there every day.
[Rush Lindell] That's not ambiguous,
[Rush Lindell] that's a press release.
[Reagan] Right,
[Reagan] and that's the documented record,
[Reagan] according to Al Jazeera's reporting from
[Reagan] According from early June,
[Reagan] Sheriff Luna said federal officials directly told him no civil immigration enforcement would happen.
[Reagan] That's a specific named official contradicting a named cabinet secretary.
[Speaker 4] That's the whole contradiction in one sentence,
[Speaker 4] Reagan.
[Speaker 4] And what I want to know,
[Speaker 4] what nobody's asking,
[Speaker 4] is who changed the policy.
[Speaker 4] Because somebody did.
[Speaker 4] Mullin didn't walk it back publicly.
[Speaker 4] The White House didn't issue a statement.
[Speaker 4] The Sheriff-
[Speaker 4] Zaref just announced it like a fait accompli.
[Reagan] Which raises the real question,
[Reagan] did something happen between May and June to force that shift?
[Speaker 4] Something did,
[Speaker 4] and it involves roughly 2,000 stadium workers and a strike vote.
[Rush Lindell] So here's what happened:
[Rush Lindell] UNITE HERE Local 11,
[Rush Lindell] roughly two thousand workers at SoFi Stadium,
[Reagan] Wow.
[Rush Lindell] filed a formal complaint to the National Labor Relations Board against FIFA and Kroenke Sports Entertainment; then they voted,
[Rush Lindell] ninety six percent,
[Rush Lindell] to authorize a strike.
[Reagan] A ninety six per cent authorization vote-that's not a close call.
[Rush Lindell] That's a mandate-and the threat worked.
[Rush Lindell] According to Al Jazeera,
[Rush Lindell] federal officials told Sheriff Luna.
[Rush Lindell] Luna,
[Rush Lindell] directly; no civil immigration enforcement at any LA World Cup event.
[Rush Lindell] Days later,
[Rush Lindell] the union cuts a deal.
[Reagan] They got wage increases,
[Reagan] job protections and one provision that's genuinely unusual:
[Reagan] the right to walk off mid match if ICE shows up and they feel threatened.
[Rush Lindell] That clause is now in the contract.
[Rush Lindell] Legal experts are calling it unprecedented in modern American labor history.
[Rush Lindell] three.
[Rush Lindell] Think about that for a second.
[Reagan] I will; and I'll also push back a little.
[Reagan] Rush,
[Reagan] does the sequence prove the Union caused the reversal?
[Reagan] Or did DHS already want this outcome and the Union gave them political cover?
[Rush Lindell] Oh,
[Rush Lindell] that's the generous read.
[Reagan] I'm serious:
[Reagan] if DHS intended to use World Cup security as an immigration dragnet,
[Reagan] yes,
[Reagan] the strike threat changed the calculus. But if the plan was always
[Reagan] ICE agents present no immigration enforcement,
[Reagan] then the union extracted a public statement confirming what was already true.
[Rush Lindell] But here's what gets me:
[Rush Lindell] a union at one sports venue filed an NLRB complaint,
[Rush Lindell] threatened to pull the cooks and the bartenders and the federal government blinked publicly.
[Rush Lindell] You know what nobody wants to say?
[Rush Lindell] That's the tail wagging the dog.
[Reagan] Or it's labor doing exactly what labor's supposed to do.
[Reagan] protecting its members through collective bargaining.
[Speaker 4] Using federal immigration policy as the bargaining chip-
[Reagan] That's a fair characterization of the mechanism.
[Reagan] Whether it's alarming depends on whether you think the policy deserved a challenge.
[Speaker 4] And that disagreement is exactly where this gets bigger,
[Speaker 4] because Local 11 wasn't the only pressure.
[Speaker 4] The sponsor campaign was operating at a complete
[Speaker 3] disadvantage.
[Rush Lindell] completely different scale.
[Rush Lindell] Now flip that on its head:
[Rush Lindell] while the Union was working the labor angle,
[Rush Lindell] Human Rights Watch was running a completely separate operation:
[Rush Lindell] corporate pressure.
[Reagan] The sponsor play-yeah,
[Reagan] that's a different kind of leverage entirely.
[Rush Lindell] So here's what HRW and the Sport and Rights Alliance did.
[Rush Lindell] They wrote to nineteen FIFA corporate sponsors-Coca-Cola,
[Rush Lindell] Visa,
[Rush Lindell] McDonald's, the whole roster.
[Rush Lindell] and said publicly demand an ICE truce, no enforcement at any World Cup venue,
[Rush Lindell] full stop.
[Rush Lindell] According to Human Rights Watch's own published report,
[Rush Lindell] six companies wrote back,
[Rush Lindell] Adidas,
[Rush Lindell] Coca-Cola,
[Rush Lindell] Lenovo,
[Rush Lindell] McDonald's, Unilever,
[Rush Lindell] Visa.
[Reagan] And what did those six say?
[Rush Lindell] They said they regularly discuss human rights with FIFA.
[Rush Lindell] That's it.
[Rush Lindell] That's the entire answer.
[Rush Lindell] No commitment,
[Rush Lindell] no endorsement, just corporate throat clearing.
[Reagan] Thirteen others didn't even respond:
[Reagan] Bank of America,
[Reagan] Aramco,
[Reagan] Verizon—total silence.
[Rush Lindell] Right.
[Rush Lindell] So the campaign got six non-answers and thirteen ghostings.
[Rush Lindell] But you know what nobody wants to say?
[Rush Lindell] It still worked as a pressure mechanism because now Coca-Cola is on record engaging FIFA about immigration enforcement. That's a news story.
[Reagan] I push back on the word worked,
[Reagan] extracting a vague corporate
[Reagan] Corporate statement isn't a policy outcome.
[Reagan] The enforcement posture didn't change because Unilever sent a letter.
[Rush Lindell] Fair; but you're grading on final score; I'm grading on field position.
[Rush Lindell] You find an event with enough corporate exposure,
[Rush Lindell] pile on the sponsors,
[Rush Lindell] and now FIFA is getting lobbied from its own partners.
[Rush Lindell] That's the template.
[Rush Lindell] That's how you move policy without a single vote.
[Reagan] And here's the irony that makes this whole picture strange.
[Reagan] Human Rights Watch is pressuring FIFA sponsors to squeeze FIFA,
[Reagan] while FIFA in December 2025 gave Trump the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize.
[Reagan] Infantino handed it to him personally at the World Cup draw.
[Rush Lindell] The FIFA Peace Prize,
[Rush Lindell] for the man whose administration,
[Rush Lindell] H.R.W.
[Rush Lindell] says,
[Rush Lindell] is running brutal immigration enforcement.
[Rush Lindell] Those two things exist simultaneously.
[Reagan] They do,
[Reagan] which tells you FIFA is playing every side at once,
[Reagan] and that's the backdrop for what happened when Iran actually showed up to play.
[Rush Lindell] Now, the Iran story.
[Rush Lindell] You want to talk about administrative theater?
[Rush Lindell] This is it.
[Reagan] Walk us through it.
[Rush Lindell] June 15th, SoFi Stadium, Iran and New Zealand play a legitimately thrilling match.
[Rush Lindell] 2-2 draw,
[Rush Lindell] two deficits erased,
[Rush Lindell] crackling crowd.
[Rush Lindell] Final whistle blows and then immediately
[Reagan] Wow.
[Rush Lindell] U.S. officials tell the team,
[Rush Lindell] bus,
[Rush Lindell] now,
[Rush Lindell] back to Tijuana.
[Reagan] Seriously?
[Reagan] No recovery night?
[Rush Lindell] None.
[Rush Lindell] Coach Amir Ghalenoei told the Associated Press.
[Rush Lindell] The press-and I'm quoting here-after the game to day they said to us,
[Rush Lindell] 'We have to leave immediately.' Captain Mehdi Torabi said the trip in took five hours of travel and security checks,
[Rush Lindell] five hours for what is normally a short run from Tijuana to LA
[Reagan] Okay,
[Reagan] so,
[Reagan] to be fair,
[Reagan] Iran's base camp is in Tijuana because the U.S. declined to host the team overnight at all; that was a known condition going in.
[Rush Lindell] Known to whom?
[Rush Lindell] Ghalenoei told reporters on record
[Speaker 3] -
[Rush Lindell] record,
[Rush Lindell] we don't know why they are returning us.
[Rush Lindell] The coach of a World Cup team doesn't know the rules he's operating under.
[Reagan] Andrew Giuliani,
[Reagan] he's running the White House FIFA task force,
[Reagan] told CBS that the team gets in the day before each match,
[Reagan] leaves the evening of the match.
[Reagan] He said, we were clear this was the process.
[Rush Lindell] Somebody forgot to tell the coach!
[Reagan] Right?
[Reagan] And then there's the winger,
[Reagan] Mehdi Torabi.
[Reagan] His visa expired after game one, single entry.
[Reagan] entry.
[Reagan] Every one else had multiple entry; he'd have missed the rest of the tournament.
[Rush Lindell] Until the State Department quietly fixed it as soon as we became aware," they said.
[Rush Lindell] Which,
[Rush Lindell] great; but how does a player at a tournament the U.S. is co hosting get a single entry visa by accident?
[Reagan] That's the question-not malice probably; but this is what policy chaos actually looks like on the ground,
[Reagan] not some dramatic standoff,
[Reagan] just a winger almost missing Belgium because of a paperwork
[Reagan] gap nobody caught.
[Rush Lindell] And that gap is exactly where the next question lives:
[Rush Lindell] who's setting the rules here and what does it mean that they keep changing?
[Rush Lindell] So let's talk about what this policy trajectory actually looks like on paper.
[Rush Lindell] February:
[Rush Lindell] Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testifies before the House Homeland Security Committee,
[Rush Lindell] asked directly whether ICE would pause operations near matches,
[Rush Lindell] he refused to commit,
[Rush Lindell] said ICE was a key part of the overall security apparatus for the tournament,
[Rush Lindell] which sounds very official until June rolls around and
[Rush Lindell] And Sheriff Luna announces actually no civil immigration enforcement at any L.A.
[Rush Lindell] World Cup event,
[Rush Lindell] full stop.
[Reagan] And that's the arc rush!" (February:
[Reagan] Lyons no commitment to pause; Mullin hedging in May on CBS; Luna announcing the truce in June; that's four months and three position shifts from the same federal apparatus.)
[Rush Lindell] Oh,
[Rush Lindell] and Congress tried.
[Rush Lindell] They introduced the Save the World Cup Act in March; would have banned federal funds for civil immigration enforcement within one mile of any match or fan festival.
[Reagan] When—nowhere.
[Reagan] GOP-controlled House killed it by
[Reagan] Build it before kick off.
[Rush Lindell] Died in committee,
[Rush Lindell] and yet the policy outcome that bill was asking for arrived anyway without a vote,
[Rush Lindell] without a signature,
[Rush Lindell] without anything.
[Reagan] That's the thing I want people to sit with.
[Reagan] You had legislators-"Rep Nellie Pouh"
[Reagan] introduced it March eighteenth-trying to encode this through the normal process.
[Reagan] That process failed; but union pressure,
[Reagan] sponsor anxiety and a county sheriff's press conference got the job done.
[Rush Lindell] So what does that tell the next union,
[Rush Lindell] or the next advocacy group,
[Rush Lindell] or-and I mean this-the next foreign government that wants a carve out at a U.S.-hosted event?
[Rush Lindell] Vent!
[Reagan] It tells them,
[Reagan] skip the legislation,
[Reagan] apply pressure at the right choke points,
[Reagan] and the policy moves without Congress touching it.
[Rush Lindell] That's not a feature,
[Rush Lindell] that is a significant problem regardless of where you land on the underlying immigration question.
[Reagan] Agreed,
[Reagan] you've essentially demonstrated that organized economic pressure outperforms the legislative process for shaping federal enforcement,
[Reagan] at least at this scale.
[Rush Lindell] And the press is treating this like a heartwarming story.
[Rush Lindell] Great witch,
[Rush Lindell] well,
[Rush Lindell] that's a conversation for.
[Rush Lindell] for right now.
[Rush Lindell] Now,
[Rush Lindell] the media angle.
[Rush Lindell] NPR ran a piece on June ninth headlined,
[Rush Lindell] quote,
[Rush Lindell] "A Warm World Cup Welcome?
[Rush Lindell] US Immigration Policies Have a Chilling Effect." Read that headline again:
[Rush Lindell] A Warm Welcome?
[Rush Lindell] A Chilling Effect?
[Rush Lindell] That framing isn't reporting,
[Rush Lindell] that's a verdict.
[Reagan] And the verdict presupposes a baseline:
[Reagan] a "warm welcome" is the default,
[Reagan] enforcement is the deviation.
[Rush Lindell] Exactly.
[Rush Lindell] You know what nobody wants to say?
[Rush Lindell] Yesterday NPR treated the ICE truce as a "restoration of normalcy," as if pausing federal immigration enforcement at a sporting event is just "what a decent country does." That's the editorial assumption baked into every paragraph.
[Reagan] The framing choice matters here; calling it a chilling effect implies the enforcement itself is the problem,
[Reagan] not the question of whether a public commitment to suspend enforcement is actually a policy reversal.
[Reagan] 'So!
[Rush Lindell] They never ask that question." The Al Jazeera piece reports that civil immigration enforcement will not occur at LA World Cup venues,
[Reagan] Right.
[Rush Lindell] full stop.
[Rush Lindell] Sheriff Luna confirmed it.
[Rush Lindell] Fine,
[Rush Lindell] that's the news.
[Rush Lindell] But where's the paragraph that says,
[Rush Lindell] "Wait,
[Rush Lindell] six weeks ago the DHS Secretary said the opposite on camera"?
[Reagan] That's the sentence that doesn't appear.
[Rush Lindell] The absence is the story.
[Rush Lindell] The mainstream coverage says enforcement was a success.
[Rush Lindell] Suspended!" What it doesn't say is who blinked and why; a union,
[Rush Lindell] a sponsor coalition and enough public noise got a written commitment
[Reagan] Wow.
[Rush Lindell] that directly contradicts what Mullin said.
[Rush Lindell] That's not a warm welcome,
[Rush Lindell] that's a negotiated retreat.
[Reagan] And covering it as a humanitarian baseline rather than a policy reversal lets every actor involved off the hook-DHS,
[Reagan] FIFA,
[Reagan] the sponsors,
[Reagan] who gave non answers.
[Rush Lindell] Nobody's on the hook in that framing.
[Rush Lindell] The story just happened.
[Rush Lindell] Enforcement chilled,
[Rush Lindell] welcome warmed,
[Rush Lindell] nobody asked how.
[Reagan] Which means the harder question,
[Reagan] did the administration actually change course or just change its public statement,
[Reagan] never gets put to anyone.
[Rush Lindell] And that question is exactly what we're about to get into.
[Rush Lindell] So,
[Rush Lindell] did they blink?
[Reagan] The public record says yes.
[Reagan] Mullin went on CBS and said ICE always does immigration enforcement.
[Reagan] We're always going to do that.
[Reagan] Left the door wide open.
[Reagan] Then Sheriff Luna announced no civil immigration enforcement at any World Cup event.
[Reagan] According to Al Jazeera,
[Reagan] that commitment came directly from federal officials.
[Rush Lindell] That's a blank.
[Reagan] Politically? Absolutely.
[Reagan] But rush,
[Reagan] the statute didn't change.
[Reagan] DHS's legal authority is exactly where it was in February.
[Reagan] What changed was the public statement.
[Rush Lindell] A written commitment that contradicts what your secretary said on camera,
[Rush Lindell] that is the policy.
[Rush Lindell] You know what nobody wants to say?
[Rush Lindell] A union and a pressure campaign and 30 days of media noise moved federal enforcement policy.
[Rush Lindell] That's the story.
[Reagan] And I'm not disputing the reversal happened.
[Reagan] I'm drawing a line between a political retreat and a legal.
[Reagan] Legal one:
[Reagan] If DHS decides next week the truce is inconvenient,
[Reagan] Sheriff Luna's announcement doesn't stop them; the authority remains intact.
[Rush Lindell] Which is the scarier version of the story?
[Rush Lindell] They caved under pressure,
[Rush Lindell] but they kept the loaded gun in the drawer.
[Reagan] That's actually the most accurate read.
[Reagan] The administration preserved legal flexibility while absorbing
[Rush Lindell] Right.
[Reagan] a political loss. Whether that matters depends entirely on what they do from here.
[Rush Lindell] And that's the question no one in mainstream coverage thought to ask,
[Rush Lindell] not whether the truce was good news,
[Rush Lindell] but whether it holds.
[Reagan] The statute doesn't expire when the tournament ends.
[Reagan] That's the part worth watching.
[Rush Lindell] So my verdict stands,
[Rush Lindell] they blinked; yours is,
[Rush Lindell] they blinked but kept their eyes open.
[Reagan] That's a fair summary.
[Rush Lindell] A union,
[Rush Lindell] a pressure campaign,
[Rush Lindell] and thirty days of media noise moved federal enforcement policy.
[Rush Lindell] Whether you call that a blink or a tactical retreat,
[Rush Lindell] somebody moved and it wasn't the union.
[Rush Lindell] As a wrap on today's Rush Lindell Show,
[Rush Lindell] and look,
[Rush Lindell] the headline here is simple.
[Rush Lindell] DHS said one thing publicly,
[Rush Lindell] then handed a written commitment to a county sheriff saying the opposite.
[Rush Lindell] That's not a policy.
[Rush Lindell] That's a contradiction.
[Reagan] And the open question,
[Reagan] the one I keep coming back to,
[Reagan] is whether that written commitment holds past the tournament.
[Reagan] The legal authority was never surrendered.
[Reagan] Only the political position was.
[Rush Lindell] Which means we'll be watching.
[Rush Lindell] Closely.
[Rush Lindell] Reagan,
[Rush Lindell] great work today.
[Reagan] This one had real layers,
[Rush Lindell] Mm-hmm.
[Reagan] worth every minute.
[Rush Lindell] If today's show got your wheels turning,
[Rush Lindell] subscribe,
[Rush Lindell] drop us a five-star review,
[Rush Lindell] and send this to someone who needs to hear it.
[Rush Lindell] New episodes every weekday.
[Rush Lindell] We're not going anywhere.
[Reagan] See you tomorrow.
[Rush Lindell] I'm Rush Lindell.
[Rush Lindell] Stay sharp.