Earlier this week, news broke for the first time that Senegalese Division II Kentucky State women’s basketball player Aminata Seck was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at Louisville’s Muhammad Ali International Airport on 7 August during a trip to attend the HBCU All-Star game in New York. Seck is listed as a Kentucky State senior and last year started 20 of 26 games, earning third-team all-conference honors and an SIAC Elite 16 award for academic achievement. According to a lawyer involved with her case, Sadiqa Reynolds, Seck has been moved through four different ICE facilities since her initial apprehension: Clay County, Chicago, Clark County and Grayson County. Reynolds noted that the reason for Seck’s imprisonment was a missed student visa deadline – what she characterized as “a paperwork situation” – due to back surgery. Reynolds also said that Seck has been suffering from an ACL injury while detained and has received only ibuprofen but no proper medical care.
ICE arrests in Kentucky have risen by 70% this year.
The Department of Homeland Security told USA Today on 23 September that Seck “chose to overstay her welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”, adding, “To be clear: a pending application or work authorization does not confer legal status in the United States.” DHS also claimed that an immigration judge issued a final order of removal for Seck on 8 September 2025, after she purportedly “failed to show up for her immigration hearing”, Notably, they emphasized that “she will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings”,
Margaret Fleming of Front Office Sports reported that a DHS spokesperson told her, “Upon entrance examination, medical personnel noted Seck was wearing a leg brace to support a knee injury that occurred prior to detention. On 21 September, she was referred to the local hospital, where she is receiving treatment for knee pain.” Yet, in the same statement, DHS remarks that it is “longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody”. This strongly suggests that Seck was denied appropriate medical care for approximately one and a half months in direct contravention of DHS policy until the case became public, at which point, after additional days passed, she was finally provided treatment.
Additionally, Hishem Alsalman, lawyer for Seck in her federal habeas corpus petition, told Fleming that the Kentucky State player “never received notice of the hearing that resulted” in her removal order and that, “far from knowingly ignoring her immigration obligations, she was actively taking steps to ensure that her student status remained intact while continuing her education at Kentucky State University.”
Moreover, Alsalman also shared with Fleming that Seck has experienced seizures during her time in detention and is currently in hospital as of 23 September.
While Reynolds reported that Seck has been receiving considerable support from Kentucky State coach Amani Williams – saying that “she has treated her like a mother would treat their child” – Williams’s response should be commended, but the safety of an international athlete cannot depend on the extraordinary efforts of an individual coach. Institutions that recruit international athletes and benefit from their athletic labor must build systems capable of supporting them when their immigration status places them at risk, rather than leaving coaches to shoulder that responsibility alone.
This case raises significant questions about the safety of international college athletes (ICAs) during a moment when the White House has more than doubled the ICE complement, claims to have deported some 605,000 people, and operates with the goal of deporting one million people per year. Indeed, just before the Seck case entered the news cycle, the official US Department of Education X account posted a photo of white fans in the crowd at the University of Texas under the banner “Make College Football Great Again” in reference to recent viral images of South Asian fans in the crowd at a Texas game. This after Ohio Senator Jon Husted introduced legislation on 14 September calling for a cap on ICAs at no more than 20% per team on the grounds that “foreign interference” is stealing opportunities from American student-athletes. The foghorn-volume insinuation of these developments is evidently that non-white, international-coded students are no longer welcome in the world of college sport.
That is a rather stunning slap in the face of ICAs given that it has previously been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that they are a “cash cow” for universities in the United States through the contribution of tuition, fees and housing to institutional revenue. While this is less true for profit-generating sports (which includes Division I women’s basketball at some schools), it certainly applies to Division II, where scholarship limitations are in effect such that, for instance, a school can only award a maximum total of 10 women’s basketball scholarships, divided as they please. It is also notable that ICAs face restrictions on their ability to benefit from NIL opportunities on US land, which makes them among the most exploited campus athletic workers in the current political economy of US college athletics, particularly below the Division 1 level – even as they experience discrimination, language barriers, financial struggles, lack of belonging, culture shock, homesickness, and other forms of emotional strain such as heightened rates of depression and anxiety.
Further, ICAs provide a financial benefit to US institutions of higher education by effectively serving as brand ambassadors such that they increase the visibility of these institutions in their home countries, providing further opportunities for predatory recruitment with an eye to tuition revenue.
Due to the inherent vulnerability of their precarious visa status and reliance on the institution itself to support that status, ICAs are among the most readily exploited campus athletic workers in terms of the amount of value that can be extracted from them without recourse to complaint. This is a common condition for any worker whose status as a worker is contingent on a visa and tied to a given corporate organization or higher education institution.
It is no wonder then that at this point there are over 25,000 ICAs across the NCAA, making up almost 13% of the entire college athlete population. In 2025, there were 713 international women’s basketball players across all divisions, sixth most of any women’s sport. One hundred fourty-four of those were, like Seck, in Division II. Only six men’s sports have more. Those numbers have risen dramatically since 2012 when the number was 294 across divisions and 85 at the Division II level specifically.
Particularly concerning in the current political environment are the geographic dynamics of ICA recruitment. Sethi’s ongoing research on ICA recruitment, based on interviews with recruiting agency owners, agents, US college coaches and recruiters, and parents of prospective ICAs, indicates that international athletes are being actively recruited not only to highly ranked Division I programs but also to lower divisions and Juco and NAIA institutions located in parts of the country that can be more difficult for coaches to recruit domestic athletes to. These emerging findings build on existing research showing that institutions unable to compete successfully for domestic talent because of factors such as institutional prestige or less desirable geographic locations have historically developed international recruiting pipelines. Sethi’s research further suggests that many ICAs make college decisions based heavily on athletic opportunity, scholarship availability, an institution’s athletic program ranking, and relationships with coaches, often with little to no knowledge of the communities and political environments in which they will be living. This is particularly relevant when thinking of Seck’s migration from Senegal to Frankfort, a small city tucked away in central Kentucky. Since ICAs are often less cognizant of these localized political and social risks, such practices might reasonably be characterized as predatory recruitment. Their immigration status can then leave them particularly dependent on the institutions that recruited them, which Sethi’s ongoing research suggests do not always fulfill the promises of support made during recruitment.
Migration studies expert Nandita Sharma, professor of sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, told us, “Both the NCAA and Kentucky State University have benefited from the excellence of Aminata Seck in both her studies and her athleticism. Yet, in her moment of need, they seem to have abandoned her. Instead of helping with the administrative work to renew her student visa, the NCAA and KSU put the onus entirely on her, even as the back surgery she needed from playing basketball kept her from doing so on time. Now, as Seck disappears into the ICE detention system, they remain silent.
Athletes like Seck are recruited by US universities because they provide athletic, reputational and financial value to these institutions. Yet when the same athletes become vulnerable because of the immigration system that governs their ability to study, compete, work and remain in the United States, institutional responsibility cannot simply disappear. Universities cannot celebrate ICAs when they score points, win championships, pay tuition dollars and expand institutional brands abroad, only to treat their immigration precarity as an individual problem when policy changes negatively impact them. If institutions are going to recruit globally, they must also take responsibility globally – developing the legal expertise, immigration support, emergency protocols and institutional protections necessary to support the ICAs they actively bring to the United States. The NCAA and its member institutions cannot have it both ways; they cannot benefit from the globalization of college sport while at the same time abandoning the athletes who make that globalization possible to navigate an increasingly precarious immigration landscape on their own.
Seck’s case must thus force the world of US college sport to confront a much larger question: what does an institution owe an ICA after convincing them to cross a border, enroll, pay, compete, and represent its name? If the answer is protection only when it is convenient, then the promise being sold to ICAs during recruitment is very different from the reality awaiting them once they arrive on USS land.
As Sharma put it: “The millions of dollars of resources that international students and athletes bring to the NCAA and to universities must be spent on ensuring the safety and status of student athletes.”
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