Santa Clara County law enforcement officials are preparing to combat sex trafficking ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
After the Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, the Santa Clara County district attorney’s Human Trafficking Task Force reported that law enforcement across 11 Bay Area counties had arrested 29 traffickers and recovered 73 sex trafficking victims. Ten were minors. One was a 12-year-old being trafficked in Oakland.
Now, with the 2026 FIFA World Cup set to bring soccer tournaments to the same stadium between June 13 and July 1, the same agencies are already thinking ahead. The games will be played throughout Canada, Mexico and the U.S., with SoFi Stadium in Inglewood hosting eight matches and Levi’s Stadium hosting six.
“The Super Bowl provided opportunities for increased awareness partnerships with analysts from various law enforcement agencies including prosecutors and community-based organizations,” said Lt. Joshua Singleton, task force commander. “We are already working with other local, state, and federal analysts to prepare for the upcoming World Cup.”
Singleton said that preparation is rooted in a broader understanding of what actually drives trafficking around major sporting events.
Events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup don’t themselves cause a spike in sex trafficking. Instead, authorities say, the influx of money and visitors creates conditions that traffickers look to take advantage of.
The Super Bowl prompted the creation of a task force of 67 agencies from Sacramento to Monterey, with a dedicated command center in Sunnyvale staffed by more than 20 analysts from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, the district attorney’s Crime Strategies Unit, federal agencies and nonprofits including In Our Backyard and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
In San Mateo County, 20 victims were recovered; in Contra Costa County, 17; and in Santa Clara County, seven victims were recovered, two traffickers arrested, and a firearm seized, according to authorities.
The task force is now applying that same regional coordination model to World Cup preparations. Singleton said his team is already working with teams in cities involved in hosting Cup matches, including the Los Angeles human trafficking task force.
However, the World Cup presents an additional challenge the Super Bowl didn’t quite match in scale.
The fan base is extensively global. Millions of visitors will arrive from countries where sex trafficking laws and cultural awareness around the issue differ significantly from those in the United States, Singleton said.
“One obstacle is creating cultural awareness around sex trafficking among people who may be used to different laws in their home country regarding sex solicitation,” he said.
To get ahead of it, the task force is taking the message directly to where fans will first arrive. Outreach efforts are planned at airports, billboard campaigns are in the works, and the team is reaching out to foreign consulates to help spread the word internationally.
Singleton acknowledged that sustaining the coordinated, multi-agency model beyond the World Cup will be difficult once the spotlight fades. Funding constraints and staffing shortages are real obstacles that don’t make headlines the way the big operations do.
Looking ahead, the stakes extend beyond the World Cup. Los Angeles is set to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, an event that will draw an even larger economic influx with a wider international crowd over a longer period of time.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
