Miami host committee assured ICE will not be at World Cup games

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not be seen at World Cup matches this summer, according to the co-chair of the Miami host committee.

Rodney Barreto told The Athletic on Thursday that he received reassurances from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that ICE would steer clear of the world soccer showcase.

"ICE is not going to be at the stadium," Barreto told The Athletic. "This is not going to turn into some ‘round them up' type of thing. That's not the purpose of this.

"It'll be a great experience for everybody. I think that we're lucky that we do have a president who loves sports and has given us the resources to reimburse the cities for their police protection."

Barreto added, "I spoke to Marco and, first of all, he's going to make sure that the passports get processed and people can get here and there is an orderly process so people won't be held up. It's going to be a major undertaking by the federal government to do that. We feel very comfortable that we're going to be in good hands."

The deployment of ICE for immigration-enforcement raids has increased since Donald Trump began his second stint as president last year, igniting a significant political debate in the U.S.

South Florida's role as a World Cup host market also comes against the backdrop of scenes from the 2024 Copa America championship game, when fans stormed the gates at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., causing a number of injuries and delaying the start of the Argentina-Colombia match.

"(The Miami World Cup organizing committee) took the position that we didn't want to be critical of the planners of that event," Barreto told The Athletic. "It wasn't our event. But now that time has passed, I would tell you that where the failure was, which was that there were no perimeters.

"People without tickets should have been nowhere near the entrance ways of that stadium. It didn't take much to overrun an entrance. But listen, you learn from all these events, and you learn to do it better and come up with different scenarios which mitigate this from happening in the future. So that's where we're at."

--Field Level Media