Basketball Trafficking: Stolen Black Panamanian Dreams

Tito is a Black Panamanian teenager with dreams of playing in the NBA. When a private high school in Texas recruits him under the guise of an athletic scholarship, he believes he’s one step closer. Instead, he becomes entangled in a system that exploits young Black athletes through the F-1 Student Visa program. In Basketball Trafficking, Javier Wallace follows Tito’s journey from international tournaments and high school to his near deportation, exposing the underbelly of the basketball pipeline that stretches across borders. Wallace situates Tito’s experience within a broader framework of anti-Blackness, labor exploitation, and the unchecked power of the NCAA and US immigration system. Tito’s story is more than a sports story - it is an urgent account of the policing and manipulation of Black male athletic labor for institutional profit. Prompting readers to consider how the global athletic industrial complex extracts and discards Black labor, Wallace demands that readers see young Black athletes not just as bodies for entertainment, but as human beings whose dreams, struggles, and lives matter.