Absent a warrant, the Los Angeles Dodgers have the right to deny federal agents access to their stadium’s parking lot.
The Los Angeles Dodgers, one of Major League Baseball’s most storied franchises, have done quite a few regrettable things in the last couple of years. National Review criticized the team in 2023 when it invited a troupe of drag queens who dressed up as nuns and mocked the Catholic faith at its “LGBTQ+ Pride Night.”
The team has diminished baseball’s fairness by hacking its payroll limits to stockpile star players. And, perhaps worst of all, it thoroughly humiliated my beloved New York Yankees in the 2024 World Series. For all of that, the Dodgers name should live in infamy.
However, I believe the Los Angeles Dodgers did nothing wrong yesterday, legally speaking, when they denied a group of federal agents access to their stadium’s parking lots, as our Moira Gleason reported.
The masked agents, whom team employees believed were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, arrived in a line of unmarked vans and SUVs before requesting permission to enter the lot, according to the Dodgers. The team refused and turned the vehicles away. Later, the Department of Homeland Security revealed that the vehicles did not belong to ICE, but rather a different federal agency, Customs and Border Protection.
Whereas ICE’s responsibility is removing unauthorized immigrants from the nation’s interior, CBP is tasked mostly with policing American borders. However, CBP does have the legal authority to search for immigrants within 100 miles of any “external boundary” of the United States such as coastline, which includes most of Los Angeles. Regardless, Homeland Security claims that CBP’s presence “had nothing to do with the Dodgers” — except for its trying to enter the team’s property, of course — and that “CBP vehicles were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement.”
The question now becomes why CBP agents were trying to access Dodger Stadium’s parking lot if not for an operation or arrest. That remains unclear. But because the Dodgers believed that the agents belonged to ICE, presumably to arrest one or more illegal immigrants, we must consider another question: Did the Dodgers violate the law by refusing to let the agents into their parking lot, thereby obstructing what they thought was federal immigration enforcement?
As a bona fide Dodgers-hater, I would love to say yes and throw this incident on the pile of Los Angeles infractions against American society. Alas, the law is the law, and the Dodgers were seemingly within their legal rights to deny those federal agents, whether they were from ICE or CBP, access to their parking lot.
The stadium and the lots that surround it are the private property of the Dodgers’ ownership group. Thanks to the Fourth Amendment, the federal government is no more entitled to access a private area than the general public is, absent a warrant. Had agents secured a warrant from a judge to search Dodger Stadium, the team could not have legally barred them from entering. However, there is no indication in media reports that any such warrant was granted or presented in this case. The agents requested voluntary consent to enter, but the Dodgers had the constitutional right to refuse, which is what they did.
But hold on a moment: Isn’t the Dodger Stadium parking lot available to the public? Thousands of people flow through the entrances every day a game is played there, so why couldn’t ICE or CBP do the same? It makes good sense that agents would need a warrant to search a restaurant’s kitchen or an office’s private safe, but surely an enormous open-air parking lot that regularly hosts tailgates must be held to a different standard?
Surprisingly, that’s not the case. The relevant standard, based on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, is whether a piece of private property is physically accessible to the public without their needing to be granted entry. Remember that, absent a warrant, federal agents’ rights to access private property are the same as everyone else’s. So, agents could enter a Walmart parking lot without a warrant, since anyone can simply drive into it. They could walk into a Chick-fil-A just as I do, probably too often. But if I were to drive up to Dodger Stadium’s parking lot right now, and I had not purchased a parking pass, or if it were not around game time, I would be unable to get beyond the front gates. The same is true of any federal agent.
As things actually played out yesterday, the Dodgers’ response to federal agents knocking at their gate was most likely fair under the law — not foul.