Doc Rivers Defiantly Doubles Down On ICE Comments, Claims NBA Great Could Have Been Rounded Up

BOSTON, MA – Milwaukee Bucks head coach Doc Rivers decided to double-down on previous criticism of ICE prior to Sunday's game against the Boston Celtics, standing by his characterization of Renee Good's death as "murder." He even implied that NBA legend Hakeem Olajuwon, a legal immigrant from Nigeria in the 1980s, could have been rounded up by ICE. 

"I look at our league and I think Olajuwon could have been taken off the streets," Rivers said. "Right now, the way brown people feel, [is that] only brown people would be taken off the streets. And it's just not right, and it's not morally right." 

OutKick followed-up with Rivers and asked if he thought "brown people" who are in the United States legally should be concerned about ICE. 

Read: Steve Kerr Apologizes For Spreading 'Misinformation' Related To ICE

"We all should be," Rivers said. "Tom Homan, who was the head of DHS, has said that they're targeting people by their color and if they can speak the language. If you're brown, you're nervous. Because I don't see anybody going in the Ukrainian villages and arresting anybody. All we can go by is what we see." 

Homan's actual quote from an interview on Fox News on July 11 of last year doesn't say what Rivers implied. 

"People need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them. They just need the totality of the circumstances, right?," Homan told Fox. "They just go through the observation, get our typical facts — based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions."

People, including Rivers apparently, took that to mean that ICE is racially-profiling citizens. But for Rivers to say that U.S. citizens who are brown should be concerned about ICE, which specifically focuses on illegal immigration, is incorrect. Rivers also left out Homan's quote about taking into consideration "the totality of the circumstances." He also left out Homan's follow-up interview with CNN two days later. 

 

(John Jones/Imagn Images)

"Let me be clear: Physical description can’t be the sole factor to give you reasonable suspicion," Homan said in a July 13 interview. "It’s articulable facts, with an ‘s.’ So appearance can be just one. For instance, if someone has an MS-13 tattoo on their face, that may be one factor to add to other factors to raise reasonable suspicion."

Rivers Stands by Previous Comments About Renee Good 

After the death of Renee Good in an incident involving an ICE agent on January 9, Rivers didn't mince words. 

"What happened in Minnesota was a straight-up murder, in my opinion," Rivers said on January 9. "It’s awful. This lady was probably trying to go home, and she didn’t make it home, and that’s really sad. The whole ICE thing is, it’s a travesty."

Since no one in the NBA media asked Rivers to explain his quote over the past few weeks, OutKick pressed the Bucks' head coach for clarification. 

"Now that some time has passed, do you still stand by those words? And when you said ‘murder,’ can you explain if you meant that in the legal sense, or as moral condemnation?" OutKick asked Rivers before the Bucks' game against the Celtics at TD Garden on Sunday afternoon. 

"Both, and I don't change that at all," Rivers responded. "The training of ICE is horrible… and being in Minnesota, where there's 130,000, I think, undocumented people, why not Texas, where there are 1.7 million undocumented?

"I think we all, everybody in this room, I would say, wants a safer America. I don't know if what we're doing right now is making it safer," Rivers said. "I know those two people in Minnesota would definitely disagree with that." 

Rivers comments come two days after Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr decided to apologize for spreading "misinformation" about ICE. 

Kerr had previously said that misinformation and a "for-profit" news cycle were dividing the country. OutKick asked Kerr directly about his comments, made after a loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves last week, in which he criticized federal immigration enforcement. 

While the Warriors coach said he misspoke, Rivers elected to double down. It'll be interesting to see how those choices play out for both men moving forward.