With the FIFA World Cup to open June 11, civil advocates warn that an international tournament billed as the most inclusive in history risks becoming a backdrop for serious rights violations on American soil.
The United States will host 78 of the 48-team tournament’s 104 matches for up to 10 million visitors across 11 cities — a scale, advocates noted in an American Community Media briefing, comparable to staging 78 consecutive Super Bowls.
That footprint has sharpened concerns about what immigration enforcement, travel bans and a spotty human rights framework could mean for fans, workers, journalists and the communities around World Cup venues.
In the shadow of ‘human rights nightmares’
Minky Worden, Director of Global Initiatives, Human Rights Watch, gives an overview of her organization’s ICE truce proposal, which would pause ICE actions and deportations during the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches.
Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch (HRW), set the tournament against its predecessors: “The human rights catastrophes around the World Cup in 2018 in Russia and 2022 in Qatar, that is the right place to start.”
Because of “the human rights nightmares” those tournaments produced, she continued, FIFA had adopted a human rights framework requiring all of this year’s 16 host cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada to adopt tailored human rights action plans. Worden described the new policy as a “beautiful yet meaningless document.”
The 2018 World Cup unfolded against what HRW then described as “the worst human rights crisis in Russia since the Soviet era.” Violations included a broad crackdown on political dissent, harassment and arbitrary detention of activists and journalists, forced labor in life-threatening weather conditions, unpaid wages and 21 construction-related worker fatalities.
Qatar 2022 proved more catastrophic still.
A 2021 Guardian investigation found that over 6,500 migrant workers died during the construction of World Cup venues and infrastructure — some in workplace accidents, others by suicide, many classified as unexplained. Conditions were exacerbated by dangerous heat, poor living quarters and a visa system that prevented workers from leaving the country. The tournament also drew international criticism for Qatar’s criminalization of same-sex relations and its press censorship.
Even with this legacy, Worden said “as many as five” of the 16 host cities required to publish human rights action plans for this year’s event had still not done so, including New Jersey, Philadelphia and Miami, the latter where FIFA is based.
Travel bans
Minky Worden discusses the oppression of women in Iran and FIFA’s failure to respond.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino declares daily on social media, Worden noted, that this will be “the largest and most inclusive World Cup,” a claim she said is contradicted by travel bans in effect for 39 countries, including qualifying nations Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti and Iran.
“These mega-events shouldn’t happen to a community, they should happen with a community,” she said. “This World Cup is not a World Cup for the world.”
The Iranian team’s situation makes the contradiction most visible. Despite qualifying for the tournament, the players are not permitted to stay in U.S. territory; they will cross the border nightly from Tijuana to compete in Los Angeles and Seattle.
Worden noted that the World Cup has historically functioned as a platform for Iranian civil rights, particularly women’s rights activists who have used the event to publicly protest gender-based stadium bans and restrictions in their home country.
Visa restrictions, Worden said, are now denying advocates like these “a right to free speech around these events.”
Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, outlined the broader, uneven landscape facing international visitors.
Travelers from U.S. Visa Waiver Program countries — primarily in Europe and parts of Asia — face “relatively simple” entry conditions, he explained. For those from the 39 countries under full travel bans, entry is simply barred.
For others, he continued, the Trump administration announced a World Cup visa bond of up to $15,000 as a condition of entry, waived only for those who secured tickets or travel plans before April 15, “to assure that they will actually leave the country once the World Cup ends.”
ICE enforcement
Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Senior Policy Analyst at Migration Policy Institute, discusses the Trump administration’s indication that FIFA event stadiums will not be targeted by ICE, but notes that nothing has been said about host cities.
While the Trump administration and FIFA have agreed that no Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations will happen at the stadiums nor fan zones, activists have received conflicting information regarding ICE arrests around the venues. Trump officials have not ruled out the possibility.
Over 120 civil society groups have issued a travel warning about “serious rights violations” for the tournament’s 10 million potential visitors. A labor union representing over 2,000 hospitality employee at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium — expected to draw 70,000 fans per match — has threatened to strike if ICE agents are deployed at the venue.
HRW, alongside the Sport and Rights Alliance and the coalition Dignity 2026, has called for an “ICE Truce” — a suspension of enforcement operations for the tournament’s duration, modeled on the Olympic Truce.
“Families, and particularly immigrant families, love the World Cup,” Worden added. “Human Rights Watch has interviewed people in host cities, in communities that are affected, and we’ve had people say to us, ‘I don’t care if I get arrested or deported, I am going to follow my team, I love the World Cup so much.’ And when we hear that, it’s very concerning.”
Katherine La Puente, senior children’s rights coordinator at HRW, put numbers to the enforcement landscape.
Drawing on data from the Deportation Data Project, she said that over 167,000 people have been arrested since January 2025 in the 11 U.S. host cities alone, with especially high numbers in Miami, Dallas and Houston.
Katherine La Puente, Children’s Rights Senior Coordinator, Human Rights Watch, shares data on ICE actions in US host cities, and discusses the risk immigrants face as World Cup games come to their cities.
She described one case HRW documented directly: A father seeking U.S. asylum brought his two children, aged 10 and 14, to the FIFA Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey last summer. While flying a recreational drone in the parking lot before the match to take a photo of himself and his family, he was arrested by ICE agents as his children watched and cried.
He was held for three months at Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, then deported to a country “where he faces persecution by the very same people who forced him to flee in the first place,” continued La Puente.
The children eventually returned to their mother, but “they had been left behind with others at the Club World Cup final that day, just showing another risk that FIFA hadn’t thought through in their child safeguarding policies,” said La Puente. “If this does happen again, what will happen to the children if they’re forcibly separated from their family members?”
Last March, FIFA adopted a child safeguarding statement, a step La Puente called positive but inadequate.
“We fear that it’s too little and too late,” she said, voicing concerns that “there’s not enough time to ensure that staff are adequately trained, adequately informed of the risk to children, and able to respond effectively, and we’re concerned that fans, including children, won’t know how to report abuses, or that FIFA will be able to remedy any that come up.”
Jamal R. Watkins, senior vice president of strategy and advancement at the NAACP — part of the group that issued the travel warning — explained why official assurances that ICE presences will be contained have offered little comfort: “We’ve seen how that’s played out here in the United States — in the loss of civilian lives and families being ripped apart.”
To truly support the fans, players and workers who “bring the World Cup to life,” he said, means resisting “the political interests of the U.S. government in certain host cities to militarize communities” and resisting the logic that puts “profits over people.”
