ICE wants the World Cup to be a show of force. Don’t let it, Kansas City | Opinion
I spent years as a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, helping build the system this country uses to vet the travelers who cross its borders. I can see that what is unfolding in Missouri and Kansas during the World Cup is not about security but a political project — mass deportation, expanded policing and the targeting of Muslims and immigrants — using the most-watched event on Earth as cover, and Kansas City as its proving ground.
One of the first times Kansas City’s leaders saw the new temporary jail in the East Bottoms they had spent $25.8 million on, it came as drone footage in a City Hall committee room — a windowless box that council members likened to a warehouse and a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. They had rushed the new jail for the World Cup, even though it now won’t open until after the matches are over.
It is the clearest sign yet of what is being done to this city in the name of welcoming the world: Whether its leaders fully realize it or not, Kansas City is being enlisted, building by building and traffic stop by traffic stop, into the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants and minorities.
Kansas City has not had a jail since 2009, so it needed one — but not this one. The city waived its own environmental review to throw up cellblocks on a deadline set by the games, sold it to the public as “beds for the World Cup” and handed construction to Brown & Root Industrial Services, a firm co-owned by KBR — the contractor that built the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Then the deadline slipped, and the jail sat empty when the matches began. A city does not bend its own rules to rush a Guantánamo builder’s detention block for a soccer tournament unless detention, not soccer, is the point.
That jail is one node in a wider machine.
Across Missouri and Kansas, 76 law enforcement agencies have signed what are known as 287(g) agreements with ICE, which essentially turn local police into immigration officers, so a broken taillight can become the first step toward deportation — in the same metropolitan area where ICE spent the winter hunting for a warehouse to hold thousands. And the machine reaches the stadium itself: ICE’s acting director told Congress the agency is part of the World Cup’s “security apparatus.” The White House border czar says agents will provide security at the matches, and more than 120 immigrants’ rights groups have issued a travel warning for the fans, players and journalists coming to watch. Every piece of it is labeled security. None of it is.
Vetted Somali referee denied entry
You can see who the machine is built for in who it turns away. Omar Abdulkadir Artan is one of the world’s most respected referees, vetted by FIFA and cleared to officiate at this tournament. Earlier this month, the Somali official was denied entry at the U.S. border, with Customs and Border Protection citing “vetting concerns.”
I know what real vetting is: A man like Artan had already been screened against every watchlist that matters. I do not believe he was stopped for security. I think he was stopped for who he is — and that is the agenda’s tell. The Muslims and migrants this administration treats as threats are, by the country’s own data, among its most committed citizens: A recent Concordia Forum poll by Opinium found that 81% of American Muslims call democracy the best system of government, and that the reflex tying Islam to terrorism is the single biggest misconception they face. That reflex is what stopped Artan at the airport.
Officials wave all this away. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman says visitors here legally have “nothing to worry about” — a promise difficult to credit from the same government that just turned away a fully vetted referee. City leaders now insist no one will be detained in the jail during the tournament, and that its purpose was always broader than the World Cup. But that story surfaced only once the building missed the games it was rushed to meet, and a justification that arrives the moment the first one collapses is rarely the true one.
This is why Kansas City matters far beyond Kansas City. A government is trying to build an apparatus for its crackdown — build the detention block, deputize the police, line the stadium with immigration agents, turn away the people it dislikes — in front of the largest audience on Earth, and pay no price for any of it. Prove it here, and it can be done anywhere.
It does not have to go that way. All agencies in Missouri and Kansas City with 287(g) agreements can suspend them for the length of the tournament, keep ICE out of stadium security and ensure that empty $25.8 million box in the East Bottoms — paid for with public safety tax dollars — turns into anything but a cage.
Kansas City fought to show the world its best. It should continue to refuse to let Washington turn it into a showcase for the opposite.
Haris Tarin is vice president of policy and programming at the 501(c)(4) nonprofit Muslim Public Affairs Council. He previously served as a senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and was chief of staff for Operation Allies Welcome to resettle Afghan refugees who assisted the United States.