By Christopher Young,
Contributing Writer,
In just days, the United States will host the largest sporting event in history. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, spread across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, is expected to bring millions of international visitors, heightened security, enormous economic activity, and intense global attention to eleven U.S. host cities, including Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Seattle, Atlanta, and the New York/New Jersey region. But is the U.S. ready to welcome the world?
As kickoff approaches, journalists and organizations are asking urgent questions: Will visa systems and border policies facilitate international travel? How will host cities balance security with civil liberties? What protections are in place for workers staffing stadiums, hospitality, transportation, and tourism services? And what impact will the tournament have on immigrant communities?
On May 29, 2026, American Community Media’s Pilar Marrero moderated a briefing on the opportunities, challenges, and unresolved questions surrounding the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and what ethnic and community media should be watching as the tournament begins. Sixty-five media outlets joined the call with four expert panelists.
Minky Worden serves as Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch. “The World Cup catastrophes in 2018 in Russia and 2022 in Qatar are the right places to start this discussion. This World Cup is the largest ever, and it is governed by a human rights framework that was really put in place because of the human rights nightmares around previous World Cups – especially in Qatar, where were talking about thousands of deaths, preventable deaths of migrant workers – building stadiums, infrastructure development, hotel rooms…human rights were in the bidding requirements for both the countries that were bidding and there was actually a human rights strategy that is a beautiful and yet meaningless document that was published.
Seventy-eight of the 104 matches will be held in the United States. You can think of the matches like 78 Super Bowls. The trends on human rights in the United States are not good. This World Cup will be held amidst violent immigration crackdown, lack of protections for LGBT people, and the lack of child safeguarding. One of the biggest risks is sports is going to be weaponized by the Trump Administration. The report has on its cover the FIFA Peace Prize, which is a form of corruption, or currying favor. A prize given to Trump that had no process, no judges, no nominees – just a prize to Trump by the head of FIFA, Gianni Infantino. Due to VISA bans by Trump, is this even truly a World Cup? Many of the athletes are exempted from the bans, but their families and supporters are not.” The 2026 FIFA World Cup begins June 11th and will conclude July 18th.
Katherine La Puente serves as Children’s Rights Senior Coordinator at Human Rights Watch, and shared, “My team has worked to document and expose risk of children’s rights and risks to immigrant communities in the context of mega sporting events, particularly the World Cup. We are concerned that this upcoming World Cup risks being defined by a lack of comprehensive sort of safeguarding protections for children, exclusion and fear for immigrant communities. Comprehensive child safeguarding would include human trafficking, sex trafficking, child labor, family separation, and other concerns. Only recently has FIFA taken steps to pass and develop child safeguarding statements. We fear that it’s too little and too late for this current World Cup because there is not enough time to implement these measures.”
The next panelist, Jamal R. Watkins, is Senior Vice President of Strategy and Advancement at the NAACP. His comments included, “Imagine if you will, as many of ten million visitors to the United States for what is the world’s largest sporting event in history and it is shrouded in the backdrop of major concerns across workers’ rights, worker security, immigration, public health, high costs, etc…what does it mean to address the heightened threats of First Amendment expression suppression for the general public and for journalists alike.
The NAACP’s advocacy focuses on three primary objectives. The first is this notion of inclusion and safeguarding. Over the years we have been advocating working with our partners to promote a comprehensive set of racial equity standards to ensure that the tournament remains safe. But it also is an inclusive environment for all players, journalists, fans, and the communities that these events are happening within. Second, there is the issue of workers’ rights. We know from past experience if we don’t protect the labor rights of those constructing the venues, preparing for the games themselves, and operating during the World Cup itself in terms of the facilities that there is going to be abuses, if you will. Lastly, there is the notion of access to remedy – what happens in terms of providing avenues for recourse if human rights standards are violated during the games. And so, when we think about this, it sounds like the onslaught of the perfect making the of negativity. But what we found is that with our coalition and advocates, we decided to issue a travel advisory, a warning for fans players, journalists and other visitors coming to the 2026 FIFA World Cup.” The NAACP advisory can be viewed at
https://naacp.org/articles/naacp-joins-growing-coalition-over-120-organizations-issue-travel-advisory-2026-fifa-world.
Ariel G. Ruiz Soto is Senior Policy Analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “Despite the three countries working together, it is important to also consider when talking about immigration how folks will be traveling to Mexico or Canada. What the conditions of their travel will be, and not just to the United States. That’s what we should talk about and pay close attention to how Mexico and Canada will actually respond to some of the same or different issues that they’ve seen. International travel to the Unites States now brings a different set of conditions making travel difficult.”
This entire briefing can be viewed at https://americancommunitymedia.org/media-briefings/the-2026-fifa-world-cup-and-americas-big-test.
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