Kansas City went 17 years without a municipal jail. But with 650,000 tourists arriving this summer for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the city rushed to build one in seven months.
The facility is set to open June 1, against a national backdrop of the largest federal deportation campaign in modern American history and an unprecedented expansion of federal policing power.
In a political moment where ICE is operating with impunity and city police departments across the country their conspirators, community organizations in Kansas City have been sounding the alarm that the World Cup Jail is a local face of this national project.
Specifically, in KC, a coalition of more than two dozen community organizations are fighting back.
On Saturday, March 28, Decarcerate KC will lead a campaign launch rally at Van Brunt Park against the $25 million “temporary” detention facility on Front Street that community members have come to call the “World Cup Jail.”
The facility sits just blocks from Frontier Academy, an elementary, middle, and high school. Jimena Galan, a parent of students at the school, spoke to what that proximity means for her family: “As a mother and sister of two wonderful kids who attended Frontier School of Innovation, I am extremely concerned about the new ‘temporary jail.’ Our kids deserve better, our community deserves better, this will not only affect my family but the entire community. Our children are watching.”
The campaign, titled “We All Deserve A Shot to Win,” highlights both the importance of sports in Kansas City and the dignity every resident deserves, while drawing sharp attention to the contractor the city chose to build the jail: Brown and Root Industrial Services.
Brown and Root is not an ordinary construction company. As a Kansas City Defender investigation revealed in October 2025, the Louisiana-based firm is co-owned by KBR, the military contractor that built the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay where the United States tortured prisoners for two decades. KBR’s record is a matter of federal litigation.
A jury found the company negligent in knowingly exposing over 100,000 people, including U.S. soldiers, to the carcinogen hexavalent chromium in Iraq and awarded $85 million in damages. The company was accused of trafficking 12 Nepali men to Iraq under false pretenses, where they were kidnapped and executed on video by militants.
This is a company with a documented pattern of building deadly environments and leaving other people inside them. And Kansas City is paying them to build a jail.
The cost of the facility has ballooned since it was first proposed, from $3.83 million in committee to $25 million today. Some city council members have said the facility “looks like an ICE detention center,” a comparison that carries particular weight against the national backdrop of mass deportations and expanded immigration enforcement.
Decarcerate KC Executive Director Amaia Cook connected the facility to the deeper contradiction of World Cup spending: “Soccer is the world’s sport because it belongs to everyone. A detention center built specifically for the World Cup sends exactly the wrong message about who Kansas City welcomes. Spending $25 million just on the construction of a detention facility instead of positive investments in our community is not the welcome we want.”
Derek Buford, an organizer with Decarcerate KC and a resident near the jail site, challenged the claim that the facility is temporary: “FIFA will leave and the jail stays in our community. In the shadows of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the city of Kansas City is building a detention center that will lock up community members long after the games are over. That’s not a World Cup investment for our City; that’s a permanent expansion of incarceration disguised as event planning.”
The city’s procurement process bypassed nearly every equity safeguard on the books. Minority and Women Business Enterprise requirements were waived. Lead certification requirements were waived. Local unions report Brown & Root has shut out Kansas City subcontractors entirely. The Fair Contracting Alliance has been denied access to the job site to verify labor compliance. The city did not stumble into this contract. It cleared the path.
The coalition’s joint statement frames the jail as part of a broader pattern: “While public resources are directed toward expanding incarceration and policing, our schools remain underfunded, our communities under-resourced, and our most vulnerable neighbors increasingly targeted by systems of surveillance and enforcement, including ICE.”
The coalition includes the following organizations:
Boots On the Ground Kansas City
Community Movement Builders – Kansas City Chapter
Decarcerate KC
Education Equity Collective
Entre Nos
Inner Space KC
Kansas City DSA
KC Tenants
KC Law Enforcement Accountability Project (KCLEAP)
Missouri Workers Center
Mobilized Motivation
Nafasi TransCare Collective
National Black United Front – Kansas City
Party for Socialism and Liberation Kansas City
Reale Justice Network
Rise Above Justice
SCL Office of Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation
Southern Christian Leadership Conference-Greater Kansas City
St. Mark Church
Stand Up KC
Sunrise Movement KC
The Hive: The Indigenous Collective
