Dallas
North Texas city at the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex; 2026 World Cup host at AT&T Stadium.
Dallas maintains a 287(g) agreement deputising local police as federal immigration agents, one of three US World Cup host cities Amnesty International flagged for the arrangement on 31 March 2026. It was also one of only four hosts to publish a human rights plan ahead of the tournament.
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2026 FIFA World CupBackground
Dallas is a North Texas city at the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. It maintains a 287(g) agreement with federal immigration authorities, deputising local police as immigration-enforcement agents, an arrangement that predates and sits independent of any single event the city hosts.
Dallas lent its name to the World Cup host bid even though the stadium itself sits across the metroplex in neighbouring Arlington; the city's own contribution ran through policing, ticketing fallout and human-rights compliance rather than through the pitch, which is why its World Cup story is a governance one rather than a footballing one.
Dallas paired a rights plan with ICE
Dallas maintains a 287(g) agreement deputising local police as federal immigration-enforcement agents, one of three US host cities Amnesty International named with such an arrangement in its 31 March report, alongside Houston and Miami. A Human Rights Watch audit published on 10 April separately logged 22,388 ICE arrests across Dallas's region since January 2025 .
Despite that enforcement posture, Dallas was also one of only four host cities, alongside Atlanta, Houston and Vancouver, to publish a human rights plan ahead of HRW's 11 May Deadline. On 8 April Dallas Police sent a senior delegation south to train alongside Monterrey's force, an improvised liaison built without any treaty framework and the first such policing exchange in World Cup history .
Dallas exposed FIFA's ticketing chaos
FIFA's fourth and final ticket sales phase crashed on opening at 11:00 EDT on 1 April 2026, and WFAA in Dallas reported local fans stuck in the wrong queue for more than 90 minutes, with FIFA's only public response that the links were "functioning properly" . Football Supporters Europe and Euroconsumers had filed an EU Article 102 complaint three days earlier asking FIFA to pause that exact window; the Dallas-documented failure became concrete evidence for their case.
Mid-tournament hotel-occupancy data published 10 July, covering roughly the tournament's first seventeen days, showed Dallas as one of only two US host cities, alongside San Francisco, to record a net year-on-year gain even as most hosts saw declines .