During the TBS television broadcast and HBO Max stream of AEW Dynamite last night (Oct. 1), recruitment advertisements for the United States Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement aired multiple times.
Viewers of WWE NXT on The CW have become familiar with the commercials, as wrestling fans seem to have been identified as a target for these ads (which will certainly work with some among us, but the ratio probably isn’t much higher among us than it is among the general population). Like
the $50,000 recruitment bonus they promise, the spots are presumably paid for by the more-than-300 percent budget increase President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill gave ICE this past summer.
To call the commercials, ICE’s recruitment drive, or almost any aspect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy “controversial” is a disservice to the people whose civil liberties those policies infringe upon and whose human rights they ignore. Needless to say, just as they’ve been the past few Tuesdays, they were a topic of conversation on the wrestle web during the latest Dynamite.
After the show in Hollywood, Florida, that conversation reached AEW World champion Hangman Adam Page. As you’d expect from a man who’s EV of choice has gone from Tesla to Rivian over the past couple years, Page now hangs his social media shingle up at X-alternative Bluesky. The Millennial Cowboy clearly didn’t like that the commercials aired on Dynamite, and had explicit instructions for followers who shared his feelings. He directed those fans to the digital complaint departments for the Warner Bros Discovery-owned outlets that ICE paid to run them.
Then he threw in a plug for his just-booked PPV match:
While this writer and others salute Page’s response, he’s going to get some blowback for it. Unless WBD is deluged with complaints, and I sadly doubt they will be, this seems unlikely to cause much drama at AEW. If nothing else, Hhis boss Tony Khan can’t say he was surprised.
Khan backed another of his champions, Brody King, when he wore an “Abolish ICE” shirt at Grand Slam Mexico (and later used to raise money for charity). King told the media after Forbidden Door London that “speaking on injustice is important to me”.
On the media call before All Out Toronto last month, Khan specifically singled out Page and King when Jonathan Ore of CBC asked if AEW was positioning itself as an alternative to WWE, politically as well as commercially:
“It’s really important to note that the wrestlers in AEW are presented very much so as their authentic selves. In the case of Brody King and Hangman Page — that’s who those guys are. That’s them being themselves. I respect Hangman Page, I respect Brody King. AEW is a wrestling organization, and we present wrestling. I want wrestling fans from all over the world and all different perspectives. That’s one of the things that makes wrestling really great. It brings people from all walks of life together.”
And what else could Khan expect after Hangman had Excalibur read this as he walked out for his big World title match at July’s All In Texas event…
“The son of a tobacco farmer who, as a young man, worked alongside immigrants during the summers of his youth. And in doing so, he learned the values of hard work, collective action, and — perhaps most importantly — respect for his fellow man.”
