Miami is quickly becoming a hub for major global sporting events, with the FIFA Club World Cup tournament kicking off Saturday, the FIFA World Cup set for next year and Formula 1 races at Hard Rock Stadium now confirmed through 2041.
Along with this distinction come concerns over the region’s ability to manage huge sporting crowds — especially after the major security breach at the Copa America final last year — and an uptick in human trafficking that law enforcement believe comes with these events.
The new FIFA Club World Cup is a supersized version of what was once a small, seven-team tournament. For the first time, 32 of the world’s top club teams will compete in a format meant to match the scale and prestige of the traditional World Cup. With 63 matches played across the U.S., and 8 of them in Miami, a huge inflow of domestic and international tourists is expected.
Immigration enforcement presence at events
The event’s scale means heightened security measures.
Homeland Security confirmed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents will be in attendance at Saturday’s match — an effort advocates link to the federal government's mounting national immigration crackdown.
Since April, CBP has been promoting its involvement in security measures for the match on Facebook, promising to work alongside local, state and federal officials.
Last Friday, the agency announced on its Facebook page and other social channels that its agents would be “suited and booted ready to provide security for the first round of games” for the FIFA Club World Cup this Saturday. They have since deleted the post.
ICE gave NBC6 a warning that "all non-American citizens need to carry proof of their legal status."
And just days before the Club World Cup kicks off there has already been controversy. The Miami Herald reports that a federal immigration agent arrived Wednesday night at a World Cup party attended by Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine-Cava. The event was cancelled by its sponsor, Telemundo, after a Coast Guard inspection including one CBP agent interrupted the festivities.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino told reporters Wednesday that he didn't have any concerns regarding a federal presence at the game.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino addresses questions about ICE presence at Club World Cup games throughout the tournament. Camera 🎥 via @USATODAY pic.twitter.com/liBGY7iN3y
— Don Summer (@donsummerone) June 11, 2025
“No, I don’t have any concerns about anything in the sense that we are very attentive on any security question, of course the most important for us is to guarantee security for all the fans who come to the games, this is our priority,” he said.
Human trafficking misconceptions
Large sporting events like these have often been associated with an uptick in human trafficking cases, but local experts warn that the reality is much more nuanced.
“ I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say that incidents of human trafficking spike during these events,” said Amanda Altman, the CEO of Kristi House, a Miami-Dade County-based children’s advocacy center. “We definitely see more incidents of arrests taking place.”
Rather, anti-trafficking advocates, like Altman, say that large sporting events are opportunities to educate the public about trafficking signs and how to report them.
“ When you're having something like the Super Bowl or FIFA World Cup tournaments in your area, everybody's paying attention,” Altman said.
Sandy Skelaney, an anti-trafficking advocate and former coordinator for Florida International University’s Gender Violence Prevention Program, said major sporting events often coincide with an increase in sex trade activity — not explicitly at the sporting venues themselves, but in the spaces that surround them.
“One of the things that you're going to see is that wherever you have a kind of proliferation of the sex industry, you're going to have trafficking popping up in the industry in some way,” she said. “It doesn't necessarily mean there's new people that weren't trafficked before, now being trafficked for this, and so you have to really understand it with that kind of nuance.”
As the founder of Florida’s first specialized program for child sex trafficking survivors and current COO of Parasol Cooperative — which provides survivor-focused technology products — Skelaney said that events like the FIFA Club World Cup bring an influx of mostly male tourism, which can trickle down and create a demand traffickers can exploit.
Her organization focuses on digital exploitation which has become a new frontier for traffickers.
“There's aspects of working with technology to help people be able to report abuses and exploitation that's happening through their social media,” she said. “Right now, the tech companies are having a really hard time when people are reporting potential trafficking recruitment and facilitation on their platforms.”
Local response
The Miami-Dade County State Attorney’s office, currently led by Katherine Fernandez Rundle, launched a human trafficking task force in 2012. Since then, they’ve coordinated the response to human trafficking-specific concerns for all major sporting events.
That includes the 2020 SuperBowl LIV where the agency reports having made 47 arrests and rescuing 20 survivors. During the last two years of Formula 1 races, the State Attorney’s Office made 115 arrests and reports rescuing 8 survivors.
Of their total count of survivors rescued, the State Attorney’s Office reports that 65% are local residents with 35% being from out of state.
For this month’s Club World Cup, the office launched a new operation on June 3. Since then, Rundle says they’ve made nine arrests and rescued three survivors.
“ We know that we are a destination city and that Florida ranks third in the U.S. in terms of the number of victims of human trafficking,” Rundle said. “And Miami-Dade is number one [in the state].” Rundle said.
The Club World Cup will serve as a dress rehearsal for Miami’s involvement in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, where the city is set to host seven of the tournament's matches.
“Right now it’s crunch time. We know it's gonna be intensified because the community's intensified. The people are intensified, the victims are gonna be intensified,” Rundle said.
She said the work will be done in conjunction with several other organizations like local police departments across Miami-Dade, grassroots organizations like the National Council of Jewish Women and the FIFA-appointed local host committee.
Rundle also confirmed her office is shifting their focus from street operations to monitoring online activity. “Now, about 40% of all the [trafficking] sales are happening online,” Rundle said.
The FIFA Club World Cup kicks off Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens.
Where to report suspected human trafficking activity:
- State Attorneys Human Trafficking Unit Number 786-775-5270
- State Attorney’s Office Human Trafficking Hotline → 305-FIX-STOP
- Human Trafficking Miami Hotline → 305-FIX-STOP
- Florida Department of Children and Families abuse hotline → 1-800-96-ABUSE
- POLARIS National Human Trafficking Hotline: 1 (888) 373-7888
- FOR EMERGENCIES CALL 911
