Deportation, Detention, and the 2026 World Cup

The 2026 World Cup is looking less like a global celebration and more like an America-First spectacle—detentions, deportations, and trade wars included.

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Jasmine Mooney often made trips to the United States. The 35-year-old actor and business consultant from Vancouver, Canada, had even secured a work visa, and attempted to cross the border with her job offer and paperwork in hand. But things went terribly wrong once she got there.

Following a strange interaction with immigration officials, who questioned the legitimacy of her visa, Mooney found herself being cuffed and detained by officers. “There was no explanation, no warning,” Mooney wrote in her harrowing first-hand account published in The Guardian. “He led me to a room, took my belongings from my hands and ordered me to put my hands against the wall. A woman immediately began patting me down,”

Mooney spent 12 days in detention, sleeping in crowded cells with more than a hundred other women, with no clear explanation as to why she had been arrested.

“It felt like I had been kidnapped.”

Since Donald Trump returned to office in January, there have been other harrowing incidents of foreign nationals like Mooney being stopped at U.S. border crossings and held for weeks at U.S. immigration detention facilities before being allowed to fly home at their own expense.

On the Canadian border, a backpacker from Wales spent nearly three weeks at a detention center before flying home this past week. Several German tourists have also been detained for several weeks, including stints in solitary confinement.

These incidents have fuelled anxiety and fear over traveling to the U.S.. Colleges like UCLA are urging foreign-born students to consider the risks of travel for spring break, while a deluge of countries including Canada, Finland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Germany have issued new travel warning for citizens planning to visit the U.S.

Adding to the complexity, the U.S. is set to host the 2026 World Cup—alongside its new trade war adversaries, Canada and Mexico (more on that later)—an event that typically attracts millions of international fans. The upcoming World Cup will be the largest in history, with 48 teams playing 104 matches across 16 cities.

But how safe will those visitors be? Will they face the same detentions and crackdowns that others have endured in recent weeks?