With just weeks remaining before the opening match at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca on June 11, Amnesty International has released a sweeping report warning that the 2026 FIFA World Cup risks becoming a platform for authoritarian repression rather than the global celebration of football its organizers had promised. The report, titled “Humanity Must Win,” documents a cascade of human rights risks across all three host countries — Canada, Mexico, and the United States — but reserves its most detailed and alarming findings for the US, which was set to host three-quarters of all matches.
The report argues that the US has undergone a fundamental transformation since it won the right to host the tournament in 2018. What FIFA once assessed as a “medium risk” hosting environment has, in Amnesty’s view, become something far more dangerous. On the first anniversary of President Trump’s inauguration, the rights watchdog described the country as facing a “human rights emergency,” characterized by what the organization has called a “recognizable pattern of authoritarian practices and erosion of human rights that Amnesty has documented for decades across countries worldwide.” The 2026 report builds on that foundation with granular detail, documenting evidence of how those patterns are likely to intersect with the tournament.
The most extensive section of the report focuses on immigration enforcement. Amnesty describes ICE and Customs and Border Protection as having “transformed into a paramilitary-style operation,” with masked, armed agents conducting warrantless raids and breaking down doors in residential neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship. The scale of the crackdown is staggering: analysis of official government data estimates that ICE and CBP deported over 500,000 people in 2025 — more than six times the number of fans expected to attend the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. ICE street arrests increased eleven-fold, and the number of children held in immigration detention rose six-fold. By March 2026, 43 people had died in ICE custody since January 2025. Two detention facilities within 50 miles of FIFA’s Miami headquarters — including the Everglades Detention Facility, widely known as “Alligator Alcatraz” — have been documented by Amnesty as sites of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and in some cases torture.
The report underscores how these conditions pose direct risks to the tournament itself. Neither FIFA nor the US authorities have provided any public guarantees that immigration enforcement will not target World Cup venues, fan zones, or watch parties. The acting director of ICE has told Congress that the agency would be “a key part of the overall security apparatus for the World Cup.” Amnesty also documents a precedent from the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025, when Human Rights Watch found that a registered asylum seeker was arrested outside MetLife Stadium for a minor civil offense and subsequently detained for three months while ICE moved to deport him, ultimately forcing his family to purchase tickets for his “voluntary departure.”
Beyond enforcement, the report raises serious concerns about discriminatory travel bans. Four qualifying nations — Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Iran, and Senegal — are among 39 countries subject to severe US visa restrictions, effectively barring most fans of those teams from attending their matches in person. Visitors will be also subject to sweeping social media vetting requirements, with the government screening applicants for what it calls “anti-Americanism.” The report additionally documents that LGBTQI+ fan groups, including England’s “Three Lions with Pride” and a network of European LGBTQI+ fan clubs, have announced they will not have a visible presence at matches in the US, citing the Trump administration’s attacks on transgender rights and what they describe as “unsafe and unacceptable” conditions for gender non-conforming fans.
The report is equally pointed in its critique of FIFA, which awarded Trump its newly created “Peace Prize” in December 2025, a decision Amnesty says has “been so widely criticized.” It also notes that FIFA has reportedly cancelled its anti-discrimination communications during the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025, the tournament’s own dress rehearsal on American soil. Host city human rights plans are described as largely inadequate: None of the published drafts from Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Boston, or San Francisco contain any provisions for protecting fans or local communities from immigration enforcement operations.
Amnesty’s conclusion is unsparing. “There is still time to save the 2026 World Cup from becoming a stage for repression and a platform for authoritarian practices,” the report states, demanding that FIFA secure public guarantees from US authorities, that host cities refuse cooperation with immigration enforcement, and that discriminatory travel bans be lifted. It calls on FIFA, national football associations, and tournament sponsors to use their collective financial leverage — FIFA stands to earn $11 billion from the event — to press for compliance. “It is these people — not governments, FIFA or sponsors — to whom football belongs,” the report concludes, “and their rights must be at the center of this tournament.”
Top photo: Trump accepts the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize in December 2025 (Daniel Torok/White House/Wikimedia Commons)
