He’s frustrated, but he’s keeping in his anger. Abdoulaye — the pseudonym of a famous Senegalese journalist who spoke to Jacobin — just doesn’t know if he’ll be able to cover his country’s match against Iraq, scheduled to take place Toronto on June 26 as part of the upcoming football World Cup. Known as the Lions of Teranga, the Senegal team are in Group I alongside two other opponents, France and Norway, who they’ll face at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium on June 16 and 22.

Accredited by FIFA and with the necessary visas in hand, Abdoulaye sums up his dilemma: “From the United States, I can enter Canadian territory, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to return to US soil” for the potential continuation of the competition. The fault, he says, lies with the restrictive anti-immigration measures enacted by the Trump administration, the impact of which could affect the forty or so journalists heading to North America from Senegal. “FIFA will have to step up and make the American organizers see reason,” our colleague notes. In any case, Abdoulaye is still in a privileged position, as thousands of his compatriots have already for months faced a wall of concrete and steel erected by the US Embassy in Dakar to cut off the legal pathway to American visas.

These drastic, often final restrictions already affect thousands of young Senegalese students eager to pursue their studies in the United States, as an extension of the famous American dream that has shaped many of their educational journeys, as well as businesspeople seeking to expand their firms in the homeland of unbridled capitalism. Other ordinary citizens — whether or not they have relatives in the United States — are simply drawn by the joy of discovering “the Great America” and its majestic symbols, such as the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, and so on. Yet the Trump administration’s ideological blindness has taken its toll.