On Saturday afternoon, a coalition gathered at Van Brunt Park at Van Brunt Boulevard and E. 16th St. in Kansas City’s Historic Northeast with signs that read “Sports Unite, Jails Separate” and “The Goal: No New Jails.” They were students, parents, organizers, and neighbors, many of them from the community directly surrounding the construction site where a $25 million detention facility is being built just blocks from Frontier School Academy, an elementary, middle, and high school.
Israel, a student at East High School in the same neighborhood, stood in front of his neighbors and described what the construction already means for young people growing up in its shadow.
“The World Cup jail makes students feel like we are being watched, that we are being targeted,” Israel said. “Building this jail in our community and next to Frontier is a daily reminder that this is where they expect to put us, that we are less than, that this is the future they see for us.”
The rally was the public launch of “We All Deserve A Shot,” a campaign led by Decarcerate KC and 22 partner organizations fighting to stop the city’s so-called “World Cup Jail” before it ever processes a single human being. The facility, a 100-bed modular detention center on Front Street, is set to open June 1, just over two weeks before Kansas City hosts its first match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
“Our political leaders want you to think that this site is temporary and will only be here for the World Cup,” Decarcerate KC leader AJ Johnson told the crowd. “But this facility will still be here by the time the class of 2026 is raising their own children.”
The coalition warns that a brand-new detention facility with no binding restrictions on its use, operated during a period of unprecedented federal immigration enforcement, could function as an immigration enforcement trap at the world’s largest sporting event. The people most likely to fill those 100 beds are not rowdy tourists. They are unhoused residents, people in mental health crisis, undocumented community members, and the working-class Black and brown Kansas Citians who have always been funneled into this city’s carceral systems.
Kansas Citians are already asking the hard question. The construction is underway. The contractor is on site. The opening date is on the calendar.
Is it too late?
It is not too late. And the coalition is clear-eyed about why.
The World Cup Jail was never just about the World Cup. City officials have already acknowledged the 100-bed modular facility on Front Street is intended to serve as a stopgap until a separate, larger permanent city jail, projected to cost $151 million, is built nearby. That permanent jail has not been approved for construction.
No binding timeline exists for tearing down the temporary facility. Nothing prevents it from being used for immigration enforcement. The city still has to decide how this building is used, who it is used against, and how long it stands. Every one of those decisions is still on the table.
Without an approved policy governing who will be detained or under what authority, the city has offered no guarantee about how this facility will be used. What it has offered is a history. And that history points in one direction: not rowdy tourists but toward unhoused residents, people in mental health crisis, undocumented community members, and the working-class Black and brown Kansas Citians who have always been funneled into this city’s carceral systems.
In 2023, Decarcerate KC mobilized and successfully pressured the Kansas City Council to cut $6 million earmarked for a new city jail design from the budget. The jail was not built.
The intervention worked because enough people showed up, made enough noise, and made the political cost of building higher than the political cost of stopping.
That same applies now, and the stakes are higher.
What the World Cup Jail Actually Is
Kansas City went 17 years without operating its own municipal jail. The city contracted with other counties to house inmates from municipal court cases. For nearly two decades, this arrangement functioned. Then 650,000 tourists were coming to town, and suddenly the city needed a jail in seven months.
The contract went to Brown and Root Industrial Services, a Louisiana-based company co-owned by KBR, the military contractor that built the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and was found liable for knowingly exposing over 100,000 people to a known carcinogen in Iraq.
The city waived Minority and Women Business Enterprise requirements, waived LEED certification requirements, and shut out local subcontractors to make it happen. Several city council members have said on record that the facility’s design resembles an ICE detention center.
That comparison carries a particular weight right now. The World Cup Jail is being built during the largest federal deportation campaign in modern American history, with the Department of Homeland Security expected to have a significant presence in Kansas City during the tournament.
Joy Mart, a leader with Sunrise Movement Kansas City, named the convergence at Saturday’s rally: “The largest international sporting event and the largest immigration crackdown are happening at the same time in the same city. This cannot be ignored. We have seen an increase in ICE kidnappings in Olathe and Kansas City. Our neighbors are being terrorized.”
$25 Million and a Choice
Decarcerate KC’s Johnson put a number to the alternative.
“I can think of 100 other ways $25 million could go into improving our communities,” Johnson told the crowd. “Supportive services for our unhoused community, green spaces, housing for all, efficient public transportation, facility improvements for our schools. Our children deserve better than this.”
The money is not abstract. Kansas City’s housing trust fund has operated on fumes for years. REACH, the city’s pre-arrest diversion program, struggles for a fraction of the resources being poured into carceral infrastructure. And this jail is only one piece of a larger buildout: Jackson County just opened a $317 million permanent detention center.
Now, the city is planning to build another large scale jail facility, funded by a 20-year sales tax that Decarcerate KC ran a campaign against and warned the city exactly what it would produce. Together, the three facilities represent more than $500 million in public investment in human caging in a single generation.
The “We All Deserve A Shot” campaign is calling on city leaders to redirect World Cup investment toward community benefit rather than incarceration.
That means stopping the facility from ever being used for immigration enforcement. It means demanding a binding, enforceable timeline for the facility’s removal. It means transparency about who will be detained and under what authority. And it means investing in the infrastructure that actually reduces harm: housing, mental health services, diversion programs, and schools.
Jimena Galan, a parent of students at Frontier Academy, spoke to what is already at stake for her family: “Our kids deserve better, our community deserves better. This will not only affect my family but the entire community. Our children are watching.”
23 Orgs Unite for a Future Beyond the Cup
Twenty-three organizations spanning abolition, labor, faith, immigrant rights, Indigenous sovereignty, education, tenants’ rights, and electoral organizing have joined the campaign, including KC Tenants, Sunrise Movement KC, Kansas City DSA, the National Black United Front, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, Entre Nos, Stand Up KC, Missouri Workers Center, and The Hive: The Indigenous Collective.
Decarcerate KC Executive Director Amaia Cook connected the facility to the deeper contradiction at the heart of the city’s 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.”
The World Cup puts Kansas City on the world’s stage. The international spotlight makes this the single worst moment for the city to be operating a brand-new detention facility built by a Guantanamo contractor next to a school. City officials know this. The coalition knows they know it. And the campaign is designed to make sure the rest of Kansas City knows it too.
The “We All Deserve A Shot” campaign is led by Decarcerate KC alongside 24 coalition partners. For more information or to get involved, contact Decarcerate KC at decarceratekc@gmail.com or visit decarceratekc.org.
The Kansas City Defender’s “While the World Watches”investigative series examines how World Cup investment is reshaping Kansas City’s carceral, transit, and surveillance infrastructure.
