Willmar’s Soccer Field Becomes Refuge Amid Heated Immigration Debate

(WILLMAR, MINNESOTA) On a fall afternoon in central Minnesota, the boys varsity soccer team at Willmar Senior High School runs onto a grass field that has become something more than a place to play. In a year when immigration enforcement and political debate have weighed heavily on this town, the field has turned into a rare refuge for teenagers whose families come from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, Somalia, Brazil, and Myanmar. All but two players on this season’s varsity are children of immigrants, and many carry worries that rarely make it into the box score but shape every practice and game.

The pressures have been relentless in 2025, when rumors of raids ripple through Willmar’s streets and WhatsApp groups and the second Trump administration’s policies loom over families. Head coach Jeff Winter, who has guided the program through years of rapid change in the community, puts it plainly:

“Every year or two, a player on Willmar’s boys varsity soccer team drops out midyear and leaves the country. Head coach Jeff Winter never knows exactly what happened.”
He says he never asks about a player’s immigration status, insisting:
“The best players get playing time, period.”
Yet he does not hide the fear that sits in the background of nearly every roster decision: “he constantly worries about his boys,” especially as “the cloud of increased immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration hovered over Willmar.”

This season’s roster tells a story beyond wins and losses. Willmar, once virtually all white as recently as the 1990s, was 40% nonwhite in 2023, and the school district today is almost two-thirds nonwhite. Students’ families speak 29 languages in their homes, and many of those languages echo across the soccer field, where the daily stresses of immigration enforcement, job shifts, and paperwork deadlines briefly fall away. Winter, a middle-school counselor turned coach, has watched the tensions spike and the sidelines become a place where parents follow the action with one eye and their phones with the other, scanning for messages about workplace checks, a denied permit, or a hearing date.

The soccer team, almost by accident, has become a barometer for the town’s mood. The incidents piled up over recent months. One varsity player left midseason to work full-time and help support his family. Another, still finishing high school in Willmar, plans to move in with his sister after his parents return to Mexico this winter. A Somali teammate was suddenly needed at home to watch six younger siblings; Winter says he called the mother week after week to argue that “soccer wasn’t some frivolous pursuit.” In the same period, a group of Haitian families received letters from the federal government instructing them to self-deport, a Nicaraguan family left after losing their work permits, a Ukrainian family headed back to Europe when the mother’s visa could not be renewed, and a high-achieving Venezuelan student left Willmar High after her mother’s visa renewal was denied. The junior varsity coach, a Guatemalan who had bridged the gap between varsity and JV and sometimes translated for families, lost his work permit and had to step away from coaching.

For the boys on the team, these changes are not bullet points on an agenda; they are absences felt in the locker room and empty seats on the team bus. Luis Gomez, the junior varsity coach’s younger brother and the varsity team’s goalkeeper, was born in Missouri. He sees the field as the safest space his teammates have left.

“Sports lets us push stuff away and focus on us. Nobody has to talk about it because everyone already knows what everyone else is going through. We’re brothers. We’re meant to be on this team. Everyone is so connected, because we were all raised in Willmar,” he said.

Senior Hector Robles has spent most of his life in Willmar. He hears the same warnings and whispers as everyone else.

“There’s always rumors of ICE around town, or somebody worried about their parents. Lots of people don’t understand the problem because it doesn’t affect them. The people who do understand, they don’t speak about it out loud. You just shut up and live your life,” he said.
Those rumors ripple especially fast in a small city where news travels through church groups and factory shifts. Volunteers from local congregations say they have taken turns buying groceries for undocumented neighbors terrified to leave their homes on a bad week for enforcement. Willmar’s proximity to major poultry and agricultural employers means the stakes are high; missing a shift can mean losing a foothold in town.

The contrast between the anxiety around town and the energy at practice can be stark. Before kickoff, the team gathers in a huddle and shouts a rallying cry that has become both promise and prayer:

“WE ARE WILLMAR! A TEAM AND A FAMILY! WE LIVE AND FIGHT TOGETHER! CHAMPIONS WE WILL ALWAYS BE!”
Parents and classmates in the bleachers know the chant as well as they know the names of the players, who include some of the school’s top students and quiet strivers who keep to themselves between classes. After games, they gather at La Manzanita Honduran restaurant or squeeze into a teammate’s basement for video games and tacos, creating a second family in a town where family structures can change overnight.

Willmar is the county seat in the biggest turkey-growing county in the largest turkey-producing state. Jennie-O turkey plants and surrounding farms power the local economy, and immigrant labor keeps those operations running at full speed. People here know the political arguments hit close to home—the same line that supplies the grocery store also supports a neighbor’s mortgage. That reality has made the community’s attitudes complicated. As Willie Gonzalez of the Latino Community Association put it:

“A bunch of them said some version of, ‘We don’t want illegal immigration; we think the guys who commit awful crimes need to be deported. But the guy who doesn’t have his papers, he works hard and he raises his family and he’s been here 10 years — he’s OK.’”
This tension—between strict views about the system and sympathy for people known by name—plays out in school board meetings, at church potlucks, and on the sidelines of the soccer team.

Inside the school, Principal Paul Schmitz says the student experience has normalized what sounds extraordinary to some outsiders.

“It’s really unbelievable to people on the outside looking in, but it’s so ordinary, so normal to all our kids. For the Great American Experiment to work, it has to work at Willmar Senior High School,” he said.
Teachers track attendance dips around rumor cycles. Counselors keep lists of students whose parents have court dates or hearings. When a student stops showing up, there is often no goodbye, just a locker emptied by a friend and another name erased from the lineup.

The pressure touches even those with legal ties. Among the Cardinals’ standouts is defender Hermis Alvarado Reyes, a Honduran who came to Willmar as a legal permanent resident and dreams of playing college soccer. He plans to apply for citizenship after he turns 18, a straightforward step in normal times. But normal times are hard to find. His father’s citizenship appointment was delayed by a government shutdown, and family memories carry older wounds. Hermis’s older half-sister, a U.S. citizen, saw her baby’s father deported to Honduras during ICE raids in 2007. For players like Hermis, paperwork is not an abstraction; it can fracture a family or freeze a future. It is why he trains hard and keeps his head down, and also why he checks his phone between drills.

Winter’s approach has been to treat the soccer team as a meritocracy, a haven, and a lifeline. He insists on standards—grades, punctuality, effort—without prying into private immigration details. He can argue with a mother that “soccer wasn’t some frivolous pursuit,” but he also understands that a teenager might have to skip practice to babysit six siblings or leave school to take a second shift. The balancing act extends to transportation, meals, and help with paperwork, all the invisible parts of high school sports that require a stable home life that some players do not have. Winter says that on a good day his job feels like coaching. On a bad day, it feels like triage.

The rhythms of immigration enforcement shape those bad days. A letter can order a family to report for removal, as Haitian parents in town experienced. A work permit can expire, stranding a family that has otherwise followed the rules, as happened to the JV coach from Guatemala and a Nicaraguan household that left Willmar. A visa renewal can be denied or delayed, dissolving the timetable for a Ukrainian family or a Venezuelan student with straight A’s. Even for those untouched by paperwork trouble, rumors of workplace checks and local stops by federal agents can be enough to keep people at home. In Willmar, parents glance at the parking lot before heading into a parent-teacher conference. Teenagers leave a friend’s house early if they hear chatter about an operation nearby. The fear of a knock at the door is not new, but it has sharpened this year.

Those fears draw a straight line to the work of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose presence is felt here mostly through rumor and memory. Robles’s words about whispers echo across the city’s churches, schools, and factories. When the JV coach lost his work authorization, it was not only a staffing issue; it was a painful signal to players that adults they trust can be removed from their lives with little notice. When a teammate moves away to care for siblings or to join relatives across the border, the departure comes with fewer goodbyes than a senior night ceremony. The soccer team absorbs these losses and keeps playing.

Despite all this, the field remains one of the few places where everyone knows the rules and the stakes are purely athletic. Coaches say the mix of styles—Brazilian flicks, Somali pace on the wings, Mexican composure in midfield, Central American grit in defense—makes the soccer team a portrait of Willmar’s new identity. “Soccer is the one sport all cultures play,” Winter likes to tell people, and for these teenagers, this year has been described as “2025 has felt so heavy.” On the best days, the players can leave “real-life problems” on the periphery of their minds and let soccer be their refuge.

The team’s connections run deeper than shared drills. Gomez’s words about brotherhood capture a sense that has built over years of growing up together in Willmar, from elementary school recess to varsity tryouts. Many of the players have parents who work at the same plants or attend the same services. They carpool to practice and share cleats. When a player quits suddenly, a teammate quietly collects his uniform and turns it in. When a player’s family gets a letter, the team circulates messages about which trusted adult can help. The team’s group chat fills with a blend of Spanish, English, and Somali, moving from memes to reminders about documentation a coach needs for a trip.

The community watches from the sidelines, proud and anxious. Longtime residents remember a town that was different; newer residents see a chance for their children to belong. That mix can produce friction—some people bristle at change—but it has also produced small gestures of care: a neighbor who offers rides to practice, a church that organizes a grocery run, a teacher who helps fill out a form. Gonzalez’s observation that many residents are strict on immigration in theory but nuanced in practice captures what plays out in Willmar block by block. It is not a perfect harmony; it is a patchwork of compromises that lets people get on with their lives even as disputes over immigration enforcement intensify.

As the season moves into its final weeks, Winter’s hope is simple: keep the team together for one more game. He knows that every year brings surprises he cannot control. He also knows that, for 90 minutes, the rules are clear. A runner times a back-post run, a defender wins a tackle, a goalkeeper like Gomez stretches for a shot he has no business saving. Afterward, they gather at La Manzanita for plates of baleadas and jokes about who misplaced their warm-up top. The talk of letters and permits will return soon enough. For now, the chant echoes again:

“WE ARE WILLMAR! A TEAM AND A FAMILY! WE LIVE AND FIGHT TOGETHER! CHAMPIONS WE WILL ALWAYS BE!”

Schmitz says the school’s daily life shows how national debates land in a specific place. His point about the “Great American Experiment” is not a slogan but a reality measured in hallway interactions and parent pick-up lines. If it is going to work, he says, it has to work in places like Willmar, where a soccer team pulls together teenagers from dozens of countries and shows what a shared goal can look like. On a field tucked between homes and streets where rumors run fast, they lace up and prove it again.