While the World Watches is The Kansas City Defender’s ongoing investigation into what the 2026 World Cup is building in its host cities: the jails, the surveillance, and the displacement the spectacle was designed to keep out of frame.
Every World Cup leaves something behind. New stadiums, new debt, new monuments to a month the host city will spend years paying off. Kansas City’s monument is a jail.
It is the only one of the sixteen 2026 host cities across the world building new detention infrastructure for the tournament, a so-called temporary facility raised by the same military contractor that built the cages at Guantanamo Bay. And to write its official plan for protecting human rights during the games, the city consulted Nike, Commerce Bank, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Department of Homeland Security (among others).
For two years, the officials preparing Kansas City to host the world have told a single story. Thousands of visitors will arrive and the money will flow. But on Thursday morning, the people who live in the cities FIFA chose answered with a story of their own.
Community leaders and residents from nine of the sixteen 2026 World Cup host cities gathered on a virtual press conference to preview an independent scorecard that will rank host cities on how they have treated the people who live there.
Structured like a soccer league table and coordinated by Dignity 2026, a coalition of labor, community, and human rights organizations coordinated through Georgetown Law’s O’Neill Institute, the scorecard grades each city against the twenty human rights benchmarks FIFA set for the tournament, with indicators spanning workers’ rights, discrimination, and access to remedies. What makes it unusual is who holds the pen.
The rankings will be scored by community groups in each city rather than by the academics housing the project. It goes live next week. “This scorecard is something that’s going to be scored by the residents themselves,” said Jennifer Li, who is coordinating the effort at Georgetown Law.
One after another, organizers described cities preparing to welcome the world by tightening the screws on their own. From Atlanta came the memory of the 1996 Olympics, when unhoused residents were jailed or bused out of town to present a cleaner face to the world.
“Real readiness means they encounter a welcoming city rather than a heavily policed one,” said Michael, director of the Play Fair ATL coalition, “a city investing in people, not just aesthetics.”
From Vancouver, where thousands have died from a toxic drug supply, organizers described surge policing already underway around the stadium. “We are concerned that the primary solution for the public health crisis will be over-policing,” said Erwin, a Vancouver organizer who worked on the 2010 Olympics, pointing to the millions of dollars allocated for police around the stadium.
From Toronto came a plea for officials to pause the closure of shelters and safe consumption sites, designated places where people can use pre-obtained drugs under the supervision of medical personnel, before the games. “We share a lot of concerns, especially as it relates to the over-policing of our communities, especially of the under-housed populations,” said Khumsa Baker, director of community engagement at the Toronto Community Benefits Network.
While each person spoke from a different city, the pattern they spoke to quickly emerged. That the spectacle arrives, and the people already there are treated as something to manage.
Kansas City’s entry in that ledger is a jail.
Amaia Cook, executive director of Decarcerate KC, told the conference what the Defender has reported for months, that the city is the only one of the sixteen hosts building new detention infrastructure for the tournament. “This is not a temporary response to a temporary event,” she said, warning that it “will outlive the tournament by decades.”
The city spent $25 million and waived its own environmental standards to finish the facility by June 1. It is not ready. The city has said people arrested on municipal charges will continue to be held at facilities in Johnson and Vernon Counties, as they have been for years. It has not explained what happens if those people need an attorney, have a medical emergency, or trigger an immigration hold.
What it has done is end its zero-fare bus program and began charging riders for the first time in six years, while residents near the stadium have been told they will need permits to drive into their own neighborhoods on match days.
“The city is rolling out the red carpet for visiting teams and tourists,” Cook said, “while rolling out fares, permits, and jail cells for the people who live here.”
What Kansas City’s coalition demanded
In the weeks before the first match, a coalition of six Kansas City organizations including Decarcerate KC, AIRR KC, Boots on the Ground Midwest, Kansas City Democratic Socialists of America, Party for Socialism and Liberation Kansas City, and the Sunrise Movement KC delivered a formal list of demands to the Kansas City World Cup Host Committee. Their opening question: “If we can host the World Cup, then what is stopping us from taking care of each other as neighbors?”
The demands are specific.
- A permanent halt to the construction of the Front Street jail.
- No street sweeps, no business raids, no encampment clearings during the tournament.
- Fifty additional shelter beds before kickoff.
- A $23-per-hour living wage for service workers.
- Enforced heat breaks at major events.
- Free bus fare maintained through the tournament.
- No cuts to the nine KCATA routes serving the city’s working-class neighborhoods after September 6.
- Know-your-rights information posted in high-traffic areas with particular attention to immigrant and Black residents.
- No cooperation with ICE during the tournament window.
The coalition framed the demands not as opposition to the World Cup but as a test of what the city actually values. “While public resources are directed toward expanding incarceration and policing,” their joint statement read, “our schools remain underfunded, our communities under-resourced, and our most vulnerable neighbors increasingly targeted by systems of surveillance and enforcement.”
The Host Committee has not publicly responded to the demands.
What the city’s own plan says
Kansas City was required by FIFA to produce a Human Rights Action Plan, an official document demonstrating that the city had considered the tournament’s impact on residents’ rights. The plan was due in late April. It arrived on May 11, seventeen days late.
It is thirteen pages long and not legally binding.
Read against the coalition’s demands, the gaps are specific and significant.
The words “jail,” “detention,” and “Front Street” do not appear anywhere in the document. The plan explains that Host Committees have “limited operational jurisdiction” over “systemic issues that transcend FIFA World Cup 2026.” The city’s only new jail in sixteen years, built in a Black and Latino neighborhood next to an elementary school, apparently qualifies as transcendent.
On unhoused residents, the plan offers one short paragraph. The city is “finalizing a policy” on relocating people experiencing homelessness and has “proposed funding” for emergency shelter. No bed count is committed. Encampment sweeps are not prohibited. The plan does not mention the anti-loitering ordinance Kansas City passed in May 2025, nor the camping ban the city of North Kansas City passed this week, active through July 21, covering every match day on Kansas City’s schedule.
On transit, the plan mentions ConnectKC26, the motor coach service built to carry tourists between the airport and Arrowhead Stadium. It does not mention KCATA. It does not mention the nine community bus routes facing cuts after the tournament ends. The plan was finalized four days before those cuts were first reported publicly. It has not been updated since.
On workers’ rights, the plan points to existing OSHA regulations and the Missouri Department of Labor. It names no wage floor. It establishes no event-specific complaint mechanism. Nothing faster than the state bureaucracy for a worker experiencing abuse during a six-week tournament.
On immigration, the plan cites the Missouri Human Rights Act. It says nothing about ICE. It does not acknowledge the federal enforcement environment that has placed Kansas City’s immigrant communities under sustained pressure throughout 2026, nor does it reference the travel advisory more than one hundred human rights organizations issued warning visitors about conditions in the United States this summer.
Public restrooms in high-traffic neighborhoods are not mentioned.
Nor are the AI surveillance cameras installed on Prospect and Troost bus routes.
Nor is Brown & Root, the military contractor that built the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay where the United States tortured prisoners for two decades, who also built the city’s new temporary jail, free of equity requirements.
The plan was developed through a consultation process the city describes as involving 118 community members and organizations. Nike, Commerce Bank, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Department of Homeland Security were apparently among those.
The grade
Cook pointed to more than twenty local organizations, labor unions, tenant unions, and immigrant rights groups among them, that have come together against the jail. She also highlighted a recent victory where organizers blocked a warehouse sale organizers blocked a 10,000-bed ICE detention facility. “We are building the power to win what our communities deserve,” she said. “If Kansas City can host the World Cup, then Kansas City can house its people. It can invest in care, safety, and dignity, not new cages.”
The tournament begins June 11, with Kansas City’s first match on June 16. The scorecard arrives the same week, the grade the city declined to give itself, written by the people best positioned to know whether it earned one.
Disclosure: Amaia Cook, executive director of Decarcerate KC, is engaged to Kansas City Defender founder and executive editor Ryan Sorrell.
