If you hear what sounds like a truly unsafe barrage of fireworks on an average weeknight this month, if you find yourself metaphorically drowning in a sea of green flags during your rush-hour commute, if your usual taquero smells like expensive tequila, don’t worry, Los Angeles. It probably just means Mexico’s national soccer team has won its latest World Cup match. Or lost it, I guess.
The FIFA World Cup begins Friday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, and officials across Los Angeles County have been touting it as a once-in-a-generation moment, a dress rehearsal for the 2028 Olympics, a $594 million injection into the local economy and proof that LA can pull off anything.
The 2026 World Cup seems different for many reasons, not least that LA will be hosting eight matches of the globe’s most popular sporting event while many of its residents are still worried about immigration crackdowns.
“If the World Cup is to fulfill its promise of unity, it must do more than fill stadiums,” José M. Alamillo and José Luis Collazo Jr. wrote recently in Zócalo. “It must heed lessons of the past to ensure that Latino communities who built the sport in the U.S. are not made to feel like outsiders in their own game.”
That tension is already happening in our own backyard, highlighted by stadium hospitality workers who had to threaten a strike just days before kickoff to secure safety guarantees.
As Ashleigh Huffman, the U.S. State Department’s former chief of sports diplomacy, noted, the global tournament is walking a razor-thin tightrope:
“I see the 2026 World Cup at the intersection of two really stark realities. Unprecedented opportunity to heal a country that is deeply divided and a world that is struggling. And unprecedented scrutiny. Everything that’s going on has the power to unite us, but it also is forcing conversations around access and human rights and immigration and who gets included in this celebration.”
Here are five questions we’re asking as the month of games get underway.
Will traffic be a mess, and can Metro handle it?
Metro’s spokesperson Jose Ubaldo told The LA Local that the agency is working “with a coalition of regional transit providers” to add 300 buses with direct service to the games.
“The regular Metro bus service won’t be disturbed,” Ubadlo said via email. “Services are aimed at helping fans reach matches, fan festivals and related events throughout Southern California.”
Metro enhanced bus service is nonstop to SoFi Stadium and will operate from 15 different locations in LA and Orange County
See the list of pick-up locations here.
Metrolink is also layering on special service and late-night runs. But given that it takes me an hour and a half to get from Koreatown to Southeast LA any given afternoon, it will remain to be seen if more buses can make a major impact.
All we have to do is look at the Mexico vs Australia friendly at the Rose Bowl a few weeks ago. I spoke to a few people who went to that game — or at least tried to — and they spent most of it stuck in just parking lot traffic.
Metro says it’s treating the event like a unique logistical quagmire. Except, it may not be unique. Even though more people generally watch the World Cup, the summer 2026 Olympic Games will be spread all over LA County with way more than just eight events.
Will local businesses actually get a boost?
The official estimate puts total economic impact at about $892 million across Los Angeles County, with $515 million in direct visitor spending, but big-event money has a habit of clustering around hotels, stadium-adjacent corridors, and tourist traps before it reaches the taquería or panadería around the corner.
Some local businesses in Boyle Heights and Pico Union have already told us they’reare already starting to see a positive impact. But a prime example of how big events don’t always equal business can be found right down the street from SoFi Stadium in downtown Inglewood. Take CoquetteKouture, a small African clothing boutique that had been a neighborhood staple for more than 36 years. While massive sports venues went up nearby, the owners, Aicha and Bass Lo, watched their actual foot traffic and sales plummet due to local gentrification, leading to the business’s eventual closure.
Will regular people find ways to enjoy it?
The city and its partners are rolling out public fan programming and transit-linked viewing options, which is the right instinct in a city where most people cannot afford the four-figure ticket.
But some of that enjoyment will depend on the next question.
How will police increase their presence?
Officials have already described the security operation as one of the largest in LA history, and that kind of language usually means more police, more cameras, more checkpoints, and more of the feeling that ordinary public space is suddenly a highly-secure government office building.
ABC7 reported the operation is being framed as a precursor to the 2028 Olympics. But as The LA Local recently reported, some organizers feel this could be the start of a new security state. The city recently authorized a rush transfer of nearly half a million dollars to build out a centralized “Real-Time Crime Center” on the third floor of the Police Administration Building, specifically racing to meet a deadline for this June’s World Cup.
The command hub will weave together AI-driven analytics, live camera feeds, and automated license plate readers. For community organizers like Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, this is history repeating itself. He told The LA Local that the city is using the World Cup as a Trojan horse to “layer in surveillance infrastructure that will still be standing long after the closing ceremonies.”
It’s a playbook straight out of the 1984 LA Olympics, when Chief Daryl Gates used massive federal funding to launch dragnet “sanitation sweeps” of unhoused people and Black and brown neighborhoods under the guise of Olympic security — leaving behind a legacy of militarized policing that Angelenos have been dealing with ever since.
Will DHS go after immigrant fans and visitors on visas?
That’s the question hanging over all of it. White House Task Force on the World Cup executive director Andrew Giuliani recently tried to wave away concerns, stating flatly that “if you’re inside the country legally, then you have nothing to worry about.” Officially, the Department of Homeland Security maintains that civil immigration enforcement will not happen at the games.
But in a city where federal immigration arrests have tripled over the last year, those reassurances can ring hollow to people struggling to get their legal status sorted. LA County Sheriff Robert Luna recently confirmed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is actively embedded in the World Cup security layout.
While officials claim ICE is only there in an “investigatory” capacity, Sheriff Luna himself admitted to reporters that the promise of zero civil enforcement is completely “subject to change.”
We will report back on these questions in 39 days, when the World Cup is over. But for now, I will just leave my fellow Mexico fans with this: “No era penal.”
