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  "path": "/border-security-theatrics-are-rising-at-historys-stupidest-world-cup",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-08T17:07:48.000Z",
  "site": "https://defector.com",
  "tags": [
    "Life's Rich Pageant",
    "Politics",
    "Soccer",
    "2026 World Cup",
    "Department of Homeland Security",
    "donald trump",
    "FIFA",
    "gianni infantino",
    "iran",
    "inexplicably reversed",
    "the Homeland Security website",
    "have been denied visas"
  ],
  "textContent": "For a World Cup host nation, the soccer is largely incidental. Even more obviously disposable are soaring ideas of bringing the international community together in a peaceful celebration of yadda yadda. In the case of the United States under the Trump administration, the point of hosting a World Cup is security theater. The nation's ideals have been whittled all the way down to the most petty shit imaginable: Hosting a World Cup forces the world to come to us when most would rather not, forces allies and enemies alike to grovel and flatter and suffer and whine at our caprice, all while we sit there with a finger jammed in our nose and our dick flopping out. It's a show not of strength but of power, something that tickles the groins of the coalition of landlords and aspiring landlords that is the main constituency of President Donald Trump.\n\nTravel visas are a perfect tool for this campaign, because they are distributed by an opaque and impenetrable bureaucracy, they can be decided on a whim and then defended as if supported by sophisticated protocols, and they offer basically nothing by way of appeal or honest recourse. Last week, a bunch of Scottish soccer fans suddenly found that their travel permits to the United States, already approved months earlier, had been inexplicably reversed. Travelers from the United Kingdom are allowed to travel to the U.S. for 90 days without securing a visa if they pass an automated screening by a program run by the Department of Homeland Security, called Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). These Scottish fans passed the screening months ago, and subsequently booked thousands of dollars in travel arrangements, before learning just days before the start of the event that their status had suddenly been updated to \"travel not authorized.\" Acting assistant secretary of Homeland Security Lauren Bis obviously could not \"speculate\" on what caused these reversals, but told the BBC that ESTA clearance \"does not guarantee admission.\" This is backed up by the Homeland Security website, which warns that this sophisticated program, the purpose of which is to authorize visa-less travel to the United States, \"does not determine whether a traveler is admissible to the United States.\"\n\nWhatever the real value of ESTA, here it has produced a desirable outcome for the Trump administration: It has generated a news story about a layer of rigor hidden behind the formal process for entry into the United States, motivating actions the basis of which cannot be described with any specificity, or interrogated. Such layers may be necessary to immigration infrastructure for a nation so adept at birthing enemies, but for the power-mad they are a wonderland of opportunity. Journalists from Africa and Iran have been denied visas that would allow them to follow the teams they cover for the games those teams play inside U.S. borders, according to the International Sports Press Association (AIPS). According to a public letter to FIFA from AIPS president Gianni Merlo, in some cases those few journalists allowed in at all were given single-entry visas, meaning that if they follow their teams for games played in, say, Toronto, they will be disallowed from returning to the United States for subsequent matches. On its face this would seem a senseless and arbitrary limitation, and it is, but it's important to remember that all there is in this case is a face, a dumb sneering face, huge and jowly, without any deep serious purpose, indifferent to if not delighted by instances where an unwieldy system foists inexplicable burdens onto groups of undesirables.",
  "title": "Border Security Theatrics Are Rising At History’s Stupidest World Cup"
}