On March 19, New Jersey congresswoman Nellie Pou, the first Latina representative from the state, introduced a bill to bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials from World Cup matches and fan fests. The representative’s 9th district includes MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, which will host eight matches this summer, including the World-Cup final.
The bill amplifies concerns voiced by several mayors of World-Cup host cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Toronto, who oppose any role for ICE during the event. Pou’s “Save the World Cup Act,” also backed by LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, supports strong security at the games. However, as she stresses, the World Cup cannot turn into an exercise of ICE’s “…meeting civil immigration quotas.”
Pou’s initiative, beyond its implications for the 2026 World Cup, summons up an intense, if frustratingly forgotten, connection to Latino immigration activism during the 1994 World Cup, also held in the United States. In Pou’s hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, as in other cities across the country, Latin American immigrant communities rallied against anti-immigrant and policing campaigns. Their actions included a stadium protest and public responses to violent crackdowns of street celebrations. Stories of these conflicts resonated in Spanish-language dailies, such as New York City’s El Diario/La Prensa, Los Angeles’s La Opinión, and Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, papers that set the disputes over fútbol and immigration in terms of larger matters over representation and belonging.
Shaming the Governor
A reckoning with this past provides fresh perspectives on an important turning point in immigration history, where in the mid-1990s Latino fans, en masse, turned political in fútbol spaces.
The 1994 World Cup took place during the backdrop of massive anti-immigrant campaigns, led in California by Governor Pete Wilson, whose campaign against “illegal immigration” was integral to his re-election bid for California governor.
The Latino population nationwide had more than doubled between 1980 and 2000, and had risen almost 70 percent in California alone from 1980 to 1990. A severe economic recession in the early 1990s heightened social tensions, and in 1994 the state’s top official became the face of the Save Our State Initiative, which strove to deny undocumented immigrants access to social services, education, and non-emergency medical attention.
Known to voters as Proposition 187, the measure gained momentum precisely during the World Cup. It was in June 1994 when Wilson embraced the issue, leaning into it to cut the double-digit lead his opponent held in the polls. It worked. Prop 187 passed later that year with 59 percent support statewide, and Wilson was re-elected. The Mexican Football Federation, however, announced a months-long boycott of California after the election, as did the World Boxing Council, presided over by José Sulaiman, of Mexico. Lawsuits also followed, and court injunctions ultimately blocked the implementation of Prop 187.
The 1994 World Cup took place during the backdrop of massive anti-immigrant campaigns, led in California by Governor Pete Wilson.
These debates made their way onto the pitch. Indeed, a loud, notable, and now largely obscured, protest shook the first World-Cup-match held in Los Angeles. Pre-tournament favorite, Colombia, was set to take the field against eventual quarter-finalist, Romania. Great expectation filled the air, with two of the era’s brilliant number 10’s on hand—Carlos “El Pibe” Valderamma, on one side, and Gheorge Hagi, whom the Spanish-language press dubbed the “Maradona of the Carpathians,” on the other.
The mood, though, of the largely Latino, pro-Colombian crowd filling the Rose Bowl, turned defiant at the sight of California Governor Pete Wilson. Reports from the La Opinión, Los Angeles’s Spanish daily, and from the Los Angeles Times describe the piercing and incessant jeering from the crowd. Fans drowned out Wilson’s opening remarks. The protest lasted several minutes. The moment was a sharp, public rebuke of a political figure. Mainstream television and print outlets reported on Romania’s rousing 3-1 win, but ignored the protest. A story on Wilson in The New York Times days later mentioned the booing, but did not explain why.
Celebrations, Cast as “Riots”
Other protests linked to the 1994 World Cup, meanwhile, arose out of celebration.
Following Mexico’s 2-1 defeat of Ireland, massive street celebrations erupted in the Queens borough of New York City, San Francisco, and the Huntington Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. In Huntington Park, located 15-20 miles southeast of the Rose Bowl, and overwhelmingly Latino and working class, an estimated 5,000-6,000 people brought traffic to a standstill on Pacific Boulevard. People waved flags, chanted México, México, ra-ra-ra, and also bore the brunt of a police reaction. Revelers faced tear gas and officers in riot gear. The militarized responses drudged up recent memories of the national guard patrolling those same streets during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The national media amplified the story about the “violent” celebrations.
Local residents, nevertheless, challenged the racist narratives spun about their community, about their fútbol culture. People sent letters to La Opinión denouncing the police and media overreactions. One Huntington Park resident, Julián Escobar, who had been at the “Pete Wilson” game at the Rose Bowl, wrote about the stadium protest. Escobar drew on the fútbol experience to ask why his community, as in the one of Huntington Park and of Latino fans more generally, had to put up with such affronts. The letter connected immigration, policing, and the World Cup. It illustrated that locals understood that their political standing was in play, amid the controversies over the street celebrations.
Weeks later and across the country, political tensions over immigration and policing again flared around Latino street celebrations. In Paterson (New Jersey), dozens of ecstatic Colombians, Peruvians, and Mexicans, poured out of restaurants and retail stores and onto 21st Avenue, jubilant over Brazil’s dramatic, shootout victory over Italy in the World-Cup final. They delighted in the “Latin American” triumph; their thunderous reactions no doubt unnerved Italian-American city officials, or at least that is how many of the revelers made sense of the police’s disproportionate response. The cops cleared the crowds with tear gas, injuring children and adults, alike. They confiscated flags, and arrested twenty people the day of the final.
The story played out in New York City’s El Diario/La Prensa, where for weeks Paterson’s residents demanded accountability. The third largest city in the state in the early 1990s, Paterson’s growth drew from Latin American and Caribbean immigration. A Peruvian consulate opened in 1987; Colombian restaurants, like El Típico, where fans gathered for the final, became spaces of sporting and cultural socialization. The “Paterson” World-Cup story moved between El Diario’s sporting, local, and opinion pages. It highlighted racialized police brutality, raising questions about why white Italian fans did not face the same scrutiny when celebrating their team earlier in the tournament. An editorial appearing ten days after the police confrontations quoted a protest letter signed by twenty residents who denounced the authorities’ profiling of Colombian restaurants and its Latino patrons.
Later that summer, soccer-playing, Latin American immigrants in surrounding townships again condemned discriminatory measures. They protested local park ordinances that prohibited pick-up games. Their complaints once more ran through the Spanish-language press, which cited the excitement from the World Cup as motivation to play in the parks. In the Paterson area, then, a series of soccer-related incidents spanning the World-Cup tournament prompted immigrant-led activism, starting from the altercations that followed Colombian and Mexican celebrations in pre-World-Cup friendlies; continuing on through the incidents of the final; and, including the disputes over playing in the park.
Politics, Back on the Pitch
As in 1994, tensions around immigration form the crucial backdrop around this year’s World Cup—an event expected to reach more than 5 billion people globally. With 48 teams and 104 total games, it will be the largest World Cup ever; it had been assumed that the 2026 competition would eclipse the World-Cup attendance record, set in 1994. Yet, the combination of travel bans, new bond requirements for entry visas, the U.S.-Israel War on Iran, and stories about TSA collaborating with ICE are dimming those prospects. It was not long ago that travel-industry leaders were optimistically forecasting that the World Cup “could account for roughly one in three additional foreign visitors to the U.S. in 2026.” Furthermore, the exorbitantly expensive ticket prices, the highest ever for a World Cup, have also raised questions about who, then, will fill the seats.
Meanwhile, there has been a renewed wave of immigration-related protests at soccer stadiums over the last year. Latino fan groups of men’s and women’s professional teams have spearheaded demonstrations nationwide. These actions have included: “moments of silence,” boycotts, and walk-outs. The protests responded to the ICE raids unleashed in spring and summer of 2025. The political outcry gained greater visibility because they overlapped with the 2025 FIFA Men’s Club World Cup tournament (June 14-July 13), which featured its own immigration tensions. A post by the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on the eve of the competition bragged that their officers would be “suited and booted” at games.
If in 2025 FIFA successfully pressed for the removal of the CBP post, it has since remained steadfast in its support of the Trump administration. FIFA President Gianni Infantino had more meetings with Trump in 2025 than any other world leader. Breaking from precedent, Infantino has, moreover, remained silent as the U.S. government refused to publicly guarantee the safety of the Iranian national team during the 2026 World Cup. In 2023, FIFA stripped Indonesia of hosting the Men’s U-20 World Cup when a regional official refused to allow Israel’s participation in its province.
The ICE raids are not abating with the World Cup looming. And neither is the political resistance. Following the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Aurora FC, of the USL W League, entered the fold. The club partnered with Wentz Homes to contribute funds to the Immigration Law Center of Minnesota.
Reclaiming the Narrative
The immigration tensions dogging the 2026 World Cup invite a deeper reckoning with the political turmoil that afflicted USA ’94, an event best remembered for its popular and profitable nature. Doing so is crucial because it lays bare the sportswashing of the 1994 World Cup, rife with FIFA, the USSF, and the mainstream media congratulating themselves on hosting an unifying event.
This dominant, sanitized version of 1994 has been important to the promoters of the 2026 World Cup who have pitched 2026 as the great sequel to 1994. The uplifting storyline about 1994 is back in circulation. It is central to how Alan Rothenberg, chairman of the 1994 World Cup Organizing Committee and former president of the USSF, promotes the organizational and sporting feats of USA ’94 in a new memoir. A similarly triumphalist tone runs through the new hype documentary, “Summer of ’94,” airing on FOX later this spring.
Reclaiming the narrative about USA ‘94 is about recognizing a history of political resistance. It is also about thinking about the “Save the World Cup Act” as part of a wave of broader social mobilizations, and insisting that soccer is political, as it long has been in the United States.
Celso Thomas Castilho is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University, where he also directs the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (CLACX). He teaches a class called Fútbol-Soccer: Culture, Gender, and Diaspora. His current book, provisionally titled, La gran fiesta: A Latino Retelling of the 1994 World Cup, focuses on the sporting, cultural, and political storylines that defined USA ’94.