The International Olympic Committee was forced to issue an urgent plea to fans amid the presence of United States Vice President JD Vance at the Winter games.
The Winter Olympics gets underway this week with the opening ceremony kickstarting the sporting extravaganza in Milan-Cortina on Friday.
However, Team USA will be competing at the game amid a tumultuous political background back home in the United States – one that has spilled over into Italy.
Just days before the curtain-raiser, protestors swept through the streets of Milan, demonstrating the deployment of the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Olympics.
The demonstrations occurred just days before Vance arrived in Italy to lead a high-profile delegation from Donald Trump’s administration at the games.
Now, President Kirsty Coventry has urged spectators at Friday’s opening ceremony to refrain from jeering the American Vice President.
US Vice President JD Vance is expected to attend the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony
Hundreds gathered in Milan on Saturday to protest using ICE agents at the Winter Olympics
‘I hope that the opening ceremony is seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful of each other,’ she said, when asked if, given the ‘geopolitical backdrop’ of the games, she thought it would be understandable if Americans were jeered during the opening ceremony.
‘No one is asking what country they come from or what religion. They are all just hanging out,’ she added, via The Daily Beast. ‘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.’
Vance is expected to attend the opening ceremony, which will take place at the Cauldron at the Arco della Pace, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The ICE agents to be deployed to Milan are not from the same unit as the immigration agents cracking down in Minnesota and other U.S. cities.
Yet, the news of the deployment of ICE agents has provoked a backlash in Italy. Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala has said they were not welcome. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has been called to Parliament to testify about the deployment this week.
The protest in Piazza XXV Aprile, a square named for the date of Italy’s liberation from Nazi fascism in 1945, drew people from the left-leaning Democratic Party, the CGIL trade union confederation and the ANPI organizations that protect the memory of Italy’s partisan resistance during World War II, along with many other people.
Organizers handed out plastic whistles, which participants blew as music blared from a van.
The protest was as much against the news that agents from a division of ICE would participate in security for the U.S. delegation as against what many of those present said they saw as creeping fascism in the United States.
IOC President Kirsty Coventry begged fans not to boo the US delegation at Friday’s ceremony
The crowd was unbothered by the fact that agents would be stationed in a control room
Organizers handed out plastic whistles, which participants blew as music blared from a van
‘No thank you, from Minnesota to the world, at the side of anyone who fights for human rights,’ read one banner.
‘Never again means never again for anyone,’ read another, and ‘Ice only in Spritz,’ a reference to a popular aperitif, read yet another.
Protester Silvana Grassi held a sign that read ‘Ice = Gestapo’. She said the scenes of ICE agents in Minneapolis shooting and killing protesters and detaining children were deeply upsetting.
‘It makes me want to cry to think of it,’ Grassi said. ‘It’s too terrible. How did they elect such a terrible, evil man?’
Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit that focuses on cross-border crimes, frequently sends its officers to overseas events like the Olympics to assist with security.
The ICE arm at the forefront of the immigration crackdown in the U.S. is known as Enforcement and Removal Operations, and there is no indication its officers are being sent to Italy.
‘Even if it’s not the same ones, we don’t want them here,’ Grassi said.
Paolo Bortoletto, also holding a banner, was aware that the officers would have an investigative and not a street role.
Still, he said, ‘We don’t want them in our country. We are a peaceful country. We don’t want fascists. It’s their ideas that bother us.’
