Super Bowl LX will take place at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. on Feb. 8, and the Santa Clara County Rapid Response Network is meeting with leadership from sports teams and different Super Bowl event venues, as well as local leaders and elected officials, to make sure the “civil and human rights of our residents are being respected and followed,” said Rebeca Armendariz, the movement building director at Working Partnerships USA and a founding member of the RRN.
Armendariz said the RRN is calling on the teams and venues “to uphold the rights of these communities, to demand that they be respected because we are the community that has made these sports teams what they are.” Aside from Levi’s Stadium, the NFL announced that venues for the event include the Moscone Center West and South Buildings in San Francisco and the San Jose Convention Center.
On “The Benny Show,” hosted by right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, Noem was asked about ICE enforcement at the Super Bowl last month following conservative outrage over the NFL’s announcement of Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny as the halftime performer. Bad Bunny has openly criticized the Trump administration and decided to exclude the U.S. mainland from his world tour due to concerns ICE agents could target his fans. Noem said of the Super Bowl: “We’ll be all over that place.”
“I think people should not be coming to the Super Bowl unless they’re law-abiding Americans who love this country,” she added.
Levi’s Stadium, as well as San Jose, which will play host to Super Bowl Opening Night, are both in Santa Clara County. The county has an immigrant population of more than 40%, including documented and undocumented individuals.
In response to Noem’s comments, the RRN got to work.
“We did what we always do … we bring our community together, we bring leaders together, we prepare, we organize, we strategize,” Armendariz said. “We refuse to operate on fear, we would rather folks be prepared, we’d rather families be ready and have their plans in place.”
Kenzie Possee is very good at fantasy football and passionate about storytelling. She graduated from UCLA in 2018 with a degree in communication studies and stress-induced insomnia from her time as editor-in-chief of the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper. Since then, she has worked across sports media with stints at the NFL, CBS Sports, Front Office Sports, OddsJam and Action Network. She has held a variety of roles ranging from NFL researcher to senior director of content strategy and operations. Kenzie lives in Seattle, where she makes art in her free time and delights in watching others draw their own meaning from it. She aspires to do the same with her reporting by crafting nuanced stories that connect data and lived experience. She’s also gotten much better at sleeping.
Eleanor (Ella) Jackson grew up in Houston, Texas. She graduated from Colby College in 2019 with a BA in Global Studies and a minor in Creative Writing. After graduation, she packed up her bags and moved to Washington, D.C. where she joined the World Resources Institute’s (WRI's) Urban Mobility team and began working on vehicle electrification projects in the United States, Latin America, and Asia. She spent the majority of this time researching the intersections of vehicle electrification and environmental justice in the United States for WRI's Electric School Bus Initiative. She then built out both student and teacher engagement workstreams to bring the project closer to those most impacted by the transition. She plans to continue working to accelerate the climate transition in a way that acknowledges, addresses, and corrects injustice. At Stanford, Ella plans to learn how to weave together narratives and data to share impactful stories and to build connections between communities both locally and globally.
Helena Getahun-Hawkins is a Journalism co-term student from Maryland, who studied International Relations and Spanish in her undergraduate years. She spent the past summer as the Daniel Pearl Memorial Intern, interning at the Wall Street Journal, where she worked under the Style News desk. A past intern for The Boston Globe and Bay City News, she has reported on a wide range of topics, from climate activism to migration to medicine. She is also a podcast enthusiast, previously serving as the managing editor of The Daily's podcast section.
