The Qatar World Cup sparked calls for boycotts. Where's the uproar about the United States in 2026?

Two citizens shot dead. A five-year-old child abducted. An entire city placed under siege by a paramilitary force operating with near-total impunity.

Controversy and calls for boycotts have surrounded recent World Cup tournaments. But this isn’t Qatar 2022.

It’s Minnesota, United States of America, 2026.

In 19 weeks, Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City will host its first of six World Cup matches, which includes a quarter-final. An opening night headlined by the reigning world champions Argentina and history’s greatest player, Lionel Messi. Fireworks, fan zones, and a carefully curated image of American hospitality broadcast to billions. The spectacle will be sold as a celebration of unity, diversity, and shared humanity.

But seven hours north of that stadium, the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, stands as a stark counter-image. Its doors do not welcome fans. Instead they hold migrants and protestors, many of them reportedly brutalised, falsely detained, and processed by ICE agents operating with a level of force more commonly associated with authoritarian regimes.

Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers was inhumane, and it deserved global condemnation. More than 6,500 migrant workers lost their lives between Qatar being awarded the 2022 World Cup in 2010 and the tournament’s opening kick-off. The world reacted with outrage. Players protested. Governments issued statements. Moral lines were drawn. And rightly so.

But moral consistency did not survive the flight west.

In the United States, migrants are separated from their children as a matter of policy. Thousands of families were torn apart at the southern border under the so-called “zero tolerance” approach, with children placed in detention centres, foster systems, or lost entirely within federal bureaucracy. Years later, some families remain separated.

Migrants have died in US custody from untreated illnesses, heat exposure, and neglect while held in overcrowded detention facilities run either by the state or by private prison contractors profiting from human confinement. Others have died attempting to cross deserts and rivers after being funnelled into more dangerous routes by US border enforcement strategies designed to deter migration through suffering.

ICE raids routinely target workplaces, homes, and courthouses. Asylum seekers are detained without charge for months. Protestors supporting migrant communities are surveilled, kettled, and arrested. Entire neighbourhoods live under the constant threat of sudden disappearance, a knock on the door, a traffic stop, a routine check-in that ends in detention, deportation or worse.

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This oppression is not an anomaly. It is systemic.

The World Cup is meant to bring the world together under the banner of football, a celebration of culture and global community. But even tourists travelling to the tournament are not safe. British nationals have been detained and shackled while trying to leave the United States. Trump has banned visas for citizens of 75 countries, including 16 nations already qualified for the tournament. A World Cup where fans are barred from entering the host country is not a celebration of football. It is a parody of one.

So where is the uproar for a World Cup staged in a country that has, in recent months, made a mockery of international law – within its borders and far beyond them. 

The United States used to present itself as a global champion of democracy, of freedom, of human rights. But ICE agents have killed eight people already in 2026. Murders, abductions, and racist state intimidation. We are witnessing what increasingly resembles the very regimes America claims to liberate the world from.

We’ve waited four years to watch the world’s best footballers compete on pristine pitches. But for many travelling to the United States this summer, the fear may not be a missed penalty, it may be an encounter with heavily armed immigration officers drunk on power, emboldened by policy and insulated from accountability.

If British footballers, politicians, and media were willing to take a moral stand against the Qatar World Cup, they must do the same for the United States. As the home of football and one of the world’s most football-obsessed countries, England taking a stand against Trump’s inhumanity would send a message far louder than others.

But if we remain silent while migrants are criminalised and detained, while ICE grows ever more authoritarian, we risk opening the doors to our very own British ICE terrorising communities on our streets in years to come.

Qatar was deemed unfit to host the World Cup because of how it treated migrant workers, consistency demands we ask the same questions now.

A nation that cages children, threatens migrants with detention, disappearance, and deportation, leaves its own citizens unsafe from state violence, bans international fans and pretends tourists can celebrate freely while militarised police patrol the streets is not fit to host the world’s game.

And the silence surrounding this World Cup is not ignorance. It is a choice.

I, for one, would rather sit out another four years than cheer for this blood-stained World Cup.

Ravishaan Rahel Muthiah is a strategic communications expert and human rights campaigner who has led groundbreaking political, climate and migrant justice campaigns.

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