Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch's 22 July review counted 54 deaths in US immigration custody in the seventeen months before the World Cup's 11 June kickoff, the highest such total in years, and logged two further deaths once the tournament began . It also found that 12 of the 16 host cities had missed their promised human rights action plan.

The organisation wants football's governing body to accept the same responsibility its own advisers identified after Qatar 2022, a duty HRW says it never fulfilled. The custody-death count and the missed-plan tally sit together as evidence of the same underlying failure: promises made during the bid process Left unenforced once the tournament actually arrived.

HRW published "Climate of Fear" on 27 April, naming Emmy-winning journalist Mario Guevara, arrested in Atlanta in June 2025 and deported to El Salvador, and journalist Estefany Rodriguez, detained covering ICE raids without a warrant; the report found 15 of 16 host city committees had failed to publish adequate human rights plans ahead of an 11 May deadline .

HRW's own audit found twelve host committees still deficient when that 11 May Deadline arrived, with only Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Vancouver having published plans; Minneapolis, the city at the centre of two fatal ICE and Customs and Border Protection shootings earlier in the year, was not among them. Football's governing body had awarded Donald Trump its inaugural Peace Prize in December 2025 while declining HRW's separate request for an ICE enforcement truce.

Human Rights Watch published "Casting Us Aside to Die" on 27 May 2026, documenting Cubans deported from the US being transferred to Mexico rather than repatriated to Havana, after Cuba stopped cooperating with US deportation flights . Without documents or legal status in Mexico, and refused entry by Cuba, the deportees the report tracked were Left effectively stateless.

The report was HRW's first systematic account of a population both governments had declined responsibility for, extending the organisation's US immigration-enforcement scrutiny from World Cup host cities into a bilateral gap that neither Washington nor Havana had any incentive to close.