Eugenio Suárez has a World Series pedigree, a fresh World Baseball Classic championship, and, by his own account, a fear that neither has managed to erase. The Cincinnati Reds third baseman delivered the ninth-inning double that clinched Venezuela's first-ever WBC title over Team USA, a tense 3-2 finish in Miami that arrived barely three months removed from the U.S. military operation that pulled Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro from power and sent him to New York to face criminal charges.
Standing alongside Suárez this year has been Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas, a two-time World Series champion born in Los Teques, Venezuela, who has spent much of 2026 describing a similar unease — despite the fact that both men hold legal U.S. residency.
That's the part that makes their comments notable. Professional athletes without citizenship almost never discuss their immigration status publicly, wary of inviting scrutiny they don't need. Suárez and Rojas broke that pattern anyway, at a moment when more than a quarter of the league's roster spots belong to players born outside the United States — 249 international players across 2026 Opening Day rosters, with Venezuela alone supplying a record 60, second only to the Dominican Republic's 93.
Fear that legal paperwork doesn't erase
Suárez didn't hedge when a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter caught up with him this spring. Asked directly about the immigration climate, he put it plainly: "I'm a resident here, but I'm still scared because you don't know." It's a sentence that captures something bigger than one player's nerves — the sense, shared by plenty of legally documented immigrants, that paperwork no longer guarantees the sense of security it once did, and that an ordinary traffic stop now carries a different kind of risk.
The timing hasn't helped. Camp opened just weeks after Maduro's ouster, and only weeks after a Minneapolis immigration operation left two U.S. citizens dead — Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot by federal agents within an 18-day span. For a locker room full of Venezuelan-born players trying to focus on roster spots and lineup cards, that backdrop made an otherwise routine spring feel anything but.
A union warning that predates this year's fear
It's worth being precise about where the league's institutional response actually came from, because the timeline matters. Back in July 2025 — a full year before Maduro's capture, the Minneapolis shootings, or this year's WBC run — MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark told Baseball Writers Association of America members that the union had instructed international players to "carry their documentation wherever they go" and had brought on immigration attorneys to field concerns from players and their families, according to Fox News's report on Clark's remarks. That guidance has simply stayed in place ever since — it wasn't a fresh response to this year's headlines, but a standing policy the union built after ICE raids intensified across Southern California in the summer of 2025.
That guidance is still very much alive inside the Reds' clubhouse this spring, though. Team president Nick Krall raised the subject with players early in camp, reminding them to keep identification on hand at all times, and manager Terry Francona has acknowledged the club can only do so much — offer reminders, show concern — without being able to resolve the deeper tension players are carrying off the field, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer's spring training coverage.
When the ballpark stopped feeling separate
For Rojas, this unease traces back further than this season. Twice in 2025, federal agents showed up near Dodger Stadium — once in June, and again the day after the team's World Series parade that November. CNN's reporting on the June incident notes that the Dodgers publicly said they'd denied ICE agents entry to the grounds, though a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson disputed that account, saying the vehicles belonged to Customs and Border Protection and never sought access to the stadium itself. The November episode was murkier still: agents were spotted in a nearby parking lot, and DHS maintained the location sat outside the stadium's perimeter entirely, accessible from public streets.
Whatever the precise boundaries, the optics rattled a fan base that's roughly 40 percent Latino by the team's own estimates. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts summed up the reaction simply: "We were all taken aback." Days after the June incident, the organization pledged $1 million in direct aid for families touched by the raids then sweeping Southern California — a pledge the team fully paid out to two nonprofit partners roughly a year later.
A complicated welcome back at the White House
The contradiction followed the Dodgers to Washington this year, too. When the team visited the White House in July to mark its second straight championship, Rojas met separately with California lawmakers critical of the administration's immigration policies, even as President Trump praised his and Cuban-born teammate Andy Pages' performance on the field without acknowledging that both men belong to the same immigrant communities his enforcement agenda has targeted, according to HuffPost.
Still underrepresented at the table
Beyond the fear of enforcement, Rojas has also pushed for something structural: more Latino voices inside the union itself. Of the MLBPA's 30 team player representatives, only Minnesota pitcher Pablo López currently identifies as Latino, a gap Rojas — once a player rep himself during an earlier round of labor talks — argues limits how well the union grasps what its Spanish-speaking members are actually navigating. "We need them to be a little bit more involved," Rojas told ESPN, pointing to language barriers and the young age — often 12 or 13 — at which many Latin American prospects leave school to chase professional contracts.
That representation gap helps explain why Suárez and Rojas speaking on the record stands out in the first place. With roughly a quarter of MLB's roster spots held by players born outside the U.S. — and Venezuela contributing more of them than any country besides the Dominican Republic — their willingness to describe what the fear actually feels like has turned what used to be a private, unspoken worry into a story the league can no longer file away as background noise.
