On 26 September, Daniela Silva was expelled from Austin FC’s match against San Diego FC for wearing a T-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”. She says she was banned from Q2 Stadium for a year. Austin FC said the ban was issued by the Austin Police Department rather than the club, and that it offered to rescind it, an offer Silva declined.
The ejection took place during Austin FC’s Hispanic Heritage Night, and six days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot a Venezuelan delivery driver, 28-year-old Wilber Garcés Pérez, in the torso in Austin, an incident that sparked protests across the city. The club’s Hispanic Heritage Night included folk dances and highlighted local nonprofits serving the Hispanic community. Austin FC’s website still states that “for Austin FC, celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month means celebrating the many cultures and communities that help make Austin what it is.”
Austin FC pointed to Major League Soccer’s fan code of conduct, which prohibits, among other things, “Displaying signs, symbols or images for commercial purposes or for electioneering, campaigning or advocating for or against any candidate, political party, legislative issue, or government action.” It is the same policy the league has cited in several other instances.
The club’s supporter groups, Los Verdes and La Murga de Austin, took issue with that reading in a joint statement. “Opposition to ICE is not an abstract political debate for many of our members and neighbors,” it read. “It is about what is happening here, in our community, and about their safety, dignity, and ability to move through it without fear. In the days since, members of our community have questioned whether they feel safe and welcome returning to Q2. That should matter to Austin FC. The club has a responsibility to communicate clearly that our Hispanic and immigrant communities are welcome and safe at Q2.”
The dispute escalated at the club’s home game on Saturday, a 4-1 loss to runaway league leaders Nashville SC, when La Murga de Austin walked out in protest at Silva’s ejection, clearing much of the supporters section. Its banner, reading “NO ICE IN THIS MELTING POT”, was taken down. “We love this club. But love is not silent,” La Murga said in a statement. “We are asking Austin FC to speak out – publicly, with conviction – against the injustice ICE is inflicting on the communities of Austin. The same communities the club says it supports. The same communities whose faces fill your marketing, whose voices fill your stadium, whose hands and hearts make this place what it is.” Austin FC has said it is engaging with supporters on the topic, and the club may well have been constrained by league regulations.
MLS has a history of these ideological confrontations with its own supporters. In 2015 the league ordered the removal of “Refugees welcome” banners at Toronto FC games. In 2019 it had to walk back its ban on the Iron Front symbol, first used by anti-Nazi paramilitaries in the 1930s and since broadly appropriated by the antifa movement, which the league had deemed political. At the other end of the spectrum, a man wearing a Make America Great Again hat was ejected from St Louis City’s stadium during a game in 2025. In the weeks after the war between Israel and Hamas began in 2023, MLS banned both Israeli and Palestinian flags in its stands as a measure it called “temporary” but which, three years on, remains in place; carveouts exist for Columbus Crew fans, granted an exemption to fly a single Palestinian flag after the club signed Palestinian striker Wessam Abou Ali, and for fans of the teams fielding the league’s eight Israeli players, who can fly a single Israeli flag. When Latino Nashville fans stayed away from their stadium in droves for fear of ICE arrests on their way home from games, the league did permit a banner reading “We’re not all here” to note their absence.
That inconsistency is where the trouble lies. In the view of the columnist Leander Schaerlaeckens, the rules feel squishy because there is no single way to coherently and consistently keep political speech out of stadiums, and the notion of apolitical sport — idealized as a how-things-used-to-be paradigm that never existed — is a fantasy. MLS is not alone in pursuing it, with most other American major leagues working just as hard to stay neutral on any matter that could cost them money by upsetting fans or drawing the ire of their overwhelmingly conservative owners, though few sports appear to have hardcore fans as politically engaged as those in American soccer. Banning T-shirts carrying mainstream messages, the argument runs, draws far more attention than simply treating fans as adults with a worldview who do not need to be policed. MLS likes to highlight its hardcore supporters when selling itself to new audiences, yet also wants to sanitize them, rather than accepting that most of them skew progressive and will proclaim their values accordingly.
A league cannot cleanse itself of the inconveniences of reality outside its facilities, especially when that reality is expressly hostile to as many as 30% of its fans, by its own count. Pretending otherwise, the piece concludes, only produces ugly episodes like the one in Austin — and a disillusioned, mistrusting fanbase.