Federal immigration agents removed a former Indianapolis Colts player from the country after he overstayed his visa for nearly a decade and racked up multiple criminal charges, a case ICE says proves no one gets a pass on enforcement.
Daniel Ogama Adongo, a 37-year-old Kenyan national once hailed as the first player from his country to suit up in the NFL, was deported from Chicago on June 20 after a Department of Justice immigration judge ordered his removal in March. Adongo had been held for several months at Miami Correctional Facility in Indiana, one of the Midwest's largest immigration detention centers, before ICE carried out the order.
Fox News broke the story, reporting that Adongo's visa had expired in 2016, just a year after the Colts cut him, and that he never left. In the years since, he was arrested repeatedly, convicted of criminal mischief with damage in 2020, and sentenced to a year in jail. Other charges over the past decade included felony intimidation, battery, and disorderly conduct, though many of those were later dismissed.
Adongo's NFL career was brief and unusual. The Colts signed the 6-foot-5, 247-pound rugby player out of New Zealand in 2013, when he was 23. The team called him an "experiment", a raw athlete with elite size and speed but no football background. He appeared in just three games during the 2015 season before the franchise released him.
His departure followed a police call to a home he shared with a female resident in Fishers, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis. On December 10, 2015, the woman texted a friend saying she needed help. That friend contacted police. When officers arrived, the woman told them she did not want medical assistance and could not explain why she had sent the text. Adongo was not at the residence when police showed up. No charges from that specific incident are mentioned in any available reporting, but the Colts placed him on the inactive list and soon cut him.
What followed was a sharp decline. Newsweek reported earlier this year that Adongo's life after football was marked by repeated contact with law enforcement, psychiatric hospitalizations, and behavioral episodes. People close to him linked his mental health struggles to possible brain injuries from his playing career, though no formal diagnosis has been publicly confirmed.
None of that history, however, changed his immigration status. His visa expired in 2016, and he remained in the country illegally for years while accumulating arrests and a criminal conviction.
Adongo's case turned on the Laken Riley Act, a federal law President Donald Trump signed in 2025. The statute requires that illegal immigrants convicted of certain crimes be detained without bond, closing a loophole that previously allowed some to walk free while their cases dragged through immigration court. ICE arrested Adongo, and the DOJ immigration judge who reviewed his case ordered him removed in March.
The Trump administration has leaned heavily on the law as it expands interior enforcement. In June alone, ICE arrested and booked more than 43,000 people into detention, with more than 65,000 in custody nationwide. ICE reported that 70 percent of those arrested were illegal immigrants charged with or convicted of crimes beyond their immigration violations. The administration has also imposed billions in fines on illegal immigrants who defied removal orders, signaling that consequences now follow noncompliance.
ICE Chicago Assistant Field Office Director Douglas Thompson did not hold back about the Adongo case. As the New York Post reported, Thompson issued a pointed statement:
"This dangerous individual was clearly a threat to the community, which is now safer since he's been removed. Those who violate immigration law are held equally accountable, including former professional athletes."
That last line carried a deliberate message. For years, the immigration system operated with an unspoken two-tier reality: those with public profiles, political connections, or sympathetic media coverage often received more latitude than ordinary visa overstays. Thompson's statement made clear that the current enforcement posture does not recognize that distinction.
The timeline matters. Adongo's visa expired in 2016. He was convicted of a crime in 2020. He cycled through arrests, jail, and psychiatric facilities for years. At no point during that span did federal authorities remove him. The system that was supposed to track visa overstays and enforce removal orders let a man with a growing criminal record remain in the country for the better part of a decade.
That pattern is not unique to Adongo. Across the country, ICE has encountered cases where individuals with expired visas and criminal histories avoided removal for years, sometimes because of court backlogs, sometimes because of deliberate policy choices by prior administrations to deprioritize enforcement against certain categories of illegal immigrants. A Florida judge recently ordered the release of a convicted plane hijacker from ICE custody ahead of deportation, illustrating how the courts themselves can complicate enforcement even when agents do their jobs.
Adongo's destination country has not been publicly reported. Kenya is his country of origin, but ICE did not confirm where the deportation flight landed.
The broader enforcement push has produced confrontations of its own. In Maine, ICE agents fatally shot a Colombian national who allegedly drove at officers during an arrest attempt. And in Louisiana, agents arrested an Australian national charged with illegally voting in two federal elections, a case that underscored how immigration violations can extend well beyond border crossings.
Adongo's mental health struggles are real, and the people who knew him have said as much publicly. Brain injuries from contact sports are a serious and well-documented problem. But sympathy for a man's medical condition does not erase the fact that he remained in the United States illegally for years, committed crimes, and was convicted. The immigration system is not a mental health program, and it cannot function if enforcement depends on whether a given case generates sympathetic coverage.
ICE summed up the administration's position in a broader statement tied to its June enforcement numbers: "If you come to our country illegally, we will find you, we will arrest you, and we will deport you."
The Adongo case is a small one in the context of 65,000 detainees and 43,000 arrests in a single month. But it carries an outsized lesson. A man who entered the country legally, overstayed his visa, broke the law, and spent years cycling through the justice system without consequence was finally removed, not because the system suddenly got tougher, but because someone decided to enforce the rules that were already on the books.
That should not be historic. It should be routine.
