Sport Labor, Student Visas, and Institutional Abandonment: Higher Education Must Build a Safe Exit

This week, many people were introduced to a hard truth through the reported detention of former Syracuse basketball player John Bol Ajak.

Ajak, a former international college athlete from South Sudan, was detained by ICE after his F-1 student visa expired while he was reportedly trying to re-enroll in school and navigating homelessness.

It is unfortunate. It is painful. And I am praying for John Bol Ajak's freedom and well-being.

But what his situation reveals is something higher education can no longer afford to ignore.

Institutions and college athletics departments know how to create a structured, resourced, and highly coordinated entry into U.S. higher education for international athletes. 

They know how to recruit them, admit them, certify them, track them, orient them, house them, and move them into competition.

What they fail to do is build a similarly deliberate and protected exit when their eligibility ends, enrollment changes, visa status becomes unstable, or an athlete’s presence no longer fits a coach’s game plan.

This is not an oversight. 

This is the system working as designed. 

International athletes are brought to the United States through higher education not only as students, but as sport labor migrants whose value is most visible when they can compete, produce, and perform.

The moment an international athlete can no longer serve the system through their uncompensated labor, the system reveals what it was really built to do and who it was never built to protect.

This was visible even in the public response. 

Former Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim, who coached Ajak at Syracuse, said, “It was just [overwhelmingly] sad when I heard he got taken. They’re taking good people out of our country.” 

The sadness is understandable, but the statement still falls short. 

It frames this as something being done to a good person by an outside force while sidestepping institutional responsibility and dodging accountability. For a coach who preached “family” and “brotherhood,” his statement stops short of naming how the men’s basketball program failed to protect one of its own.

The harder question is not only who detained John Bol Ajak, but what structures failed him long before that moment and who was responsible for building something better.

I have been thinking about this deeply since interviewing Dr. Javier Wallace during the launch of his book Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams. Wallace is one of the scholars helping name what too many institutions still avoid. In tracing the exploitative and unregulated migration of Black athletes through the F-1 student visa pipeline, his work sharpens the language we need to understand cases like John Bol Ajak’s not as isolated tragedies, but as reflections of a larger system of anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and institutional power. 

As Dr. Wallace shows in his book and through public scholarship, the F-1 student visa can operate as a mechanism through which Black athletic labor is recruited, surveilled, and eventually introduced to instability. 

John Bol Ajak’s story is a case example. 

What makes this moment even more frustrating is that it comes at a time when there has been increased scholarship, conference presentations, and professional dialogue about international athletes in U.S. higher education.

The issue is not that higher education has no language for these challenges.

The issue is that practice has not caught up to what we already know.

There is still a clear divide between what is studied (research) and what is structurally built (implementation). 

This should concern all of us.

There is also a gap within the literature itself.

Much of the scholarship on international college athletes has focused on adjustment, transition, and acculturation, often without centering Black international athletes in any deliberate way. Instead, a call for increased “racial diversity” in participants is acknowledged in the “future directions” section rather than treated as a present-day imperative for research, policy, and practice.

This matters.

Because Black international athletes do not move through college sport simply as “international students” or “college athletes” in general. They navigate these systems at the intersection of race, migration, labor, and institutional power. When those intersections are ignored, institutions build support models that are colorblind, ineffective, and harmful.

I am a college athlete development educator, entrepreneur, and PhD candidate.

My dissertation explicitly focuses on the experiences of Black international college athletes in U.S. higher education – on purpose. 

This conversation is not peripheral to my work. It is the work. And it is personal. 

It’s part of my larger commitment to challenging and reimagining systems that better support this population with their full humanity at the center.

As such, I ask… 

If universities work so intentionally to bring international athletes into the United States, what responsibility do they hold to help them exit college sport safely?

I believe the answer is clear.

They hold a major one.

I define a safe exit as an institutionally facilitated transition out of college sport that protects an international athlete’s immigration status, educational continuity, housing security, and career pathway after their sport participation changes or ends.

Institutions benefit from the recruitment, enrollment, performance, and branding power of international athletes. Institutions also bear responsibility for building the conditions for a stable transition when an athlete's competition career ends.

Let me be abundantly clear.

This responsibility cannot sit with one office or within one staff member’s portfolio. 

Instead, the work belongs to an institution’s ecosystem inclusive of athletics, international student services, compliance, academic advising, student affairs, career services, alumni engagement, coaching staffs, and qualified legal or immigration referral partners where needed.

A safe exit is not a side project.

It is a cross-functional institutional obligation.

Yes – it starts with education. But it cannot end there.

International athletes should receive clear, recurring education on how immigration status intersects with enrollment, transfer decisions, graduation timelines, injury, dismissal, postgraduate planning, and unexpected disruptions. 

Recurring. Not shared once in a team compliance meeting, an orientation presentation slide, or one rushed conversation after an incident.

This education has to be embedded throughout the athlete lifecycle.

This education should happen while their coaches, academic advisors, and support staff are also present. 

But education is only the first layer.

The deeper need is infrastructure.

This means institutions should have formal transition protocols for international athletes approaching graduation, exhausting eligibility, leaving teams, or facing academic instability. 

This means athletics and international offices should have clear handoff procedures, not informal referrals. 

This means emergency support should exist for housing, basic needs, and urgent transition moments. 

This means career development should be tied to the actual realities Black international athletes face, such as work authorization questions, graduate school pathways, global career planning, and the racial realities that shape how these athletes are perceived and supported in professional spaces.

Right now, too many institutions operate with the opposite logic.

Arrival is carefully coordinated. Transition is left to the individual.

Recruitment is resourced. Departure is left to chance.

Entry is institutionalized. Exit is neglected.

We should know better now.

And because we know better, we have a responsibility to build better.

Walk With TFB exists to help colleges and universities close the gap between research and practice by building infrastructure that supports international athletes across the full athlete lifecycle. This includes recruitment, retention, and career readiness. This includes helping institutions think more clearly about cross-campus coordination, athlete education, transition planning, and sustainable support models that reflect the realities of a more global college sport landscape.

Because international athlete development does not stop at once athletes are enrolled in courses and competing in their sport.

Under DHS guidance, F-1 students have a 60-day grace period after completing their program to depart, transfer, or take other authorized steps. This is one reason transition cannot be treated casually or left to chance.

John Bol Ajak is not the first international athlete to fall into the gap between athletics, immigration, and student support.

But he should be the last.

Unfortunately, case examples are often the impetus for real change. It should not take pain for institutions to act, but too often pain is what forces honesty. 

Higher education and college sport can no longer claim ignorance.

We have enough research, dialogue, and evidence to know this infrastructure is missing.

Now the question is whether colleges and universities are willing to build and fund it.

Institutions have spent years and a lot of money learning how to bring international athletes into U.S. higher education.

It is time to build the same level of care and coordination around transition that was built around arrival.

It's happening. We walking.

TFB