DREAM TEAM

Soccer Without Borders is two decades old, but its players have never faced a rival like Trump.

- Samantha Michaels

Dilan Pinzón, center, practices with his teammates.

WHEN I FIRST encountered 21-year-old Dilan Pinzón back in April 2025, he was sitting on the sidelines of a soccer field in Oakland, California, clad in cleats and a blue jersey, pondering his team's fate.

It was the third game of the season for Soccer Without Borders Academy, which hadn't won a single match played the previous season, their first. Beyond the normal challenges of fielding a winning roster, Pinzón and most of his student teammates are recently arrived immigrants. Some, like him, are in the United States without family support, and have financial responsibilities—jobs on top of schoolwork—that make coordinating a full practice impossible. Traveling to workouts feels risky, too, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents randomly targeting people based on language and skin color. “We are not a normal team,” notes coach Eric Cortez.

Pinzón, who has freckles across his nose and a Donald Duck tattoo on his calf, seemed restless as he waited to sub in, doing calisthenics to keep moving. He arrived in 2023 as a teenager, traveling from Colombia with his dad, who abandoned him soon after. For eight months, he slept alone in a Planet Fitness parking lot, in a rented Prius, before enrolling at Oakland International High School. The saga cost him years of schooling, and so he enrolled as a sophomore at age 19, supporting himself by making food deliveries, often until 3 a.m. But despite his sleep deprivation, Pinzón was never late to a game. Being on the field with this team, he told me in Spanish, is “my perfect place.”