Law enforcement officials in Santa Clara County are gearing up to crack down on 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. report that law enforcement in all 11 Bay Area counties arrested 29 traffickers and found 73 sex trafficking victims. Ten were children. One was a 12-year-old boy who was being trafficked from Oakland.
Now, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup will bring football tournaments to the same stadium between June 13 and July 1, the same organizations are thinking ahead. The games will be played across Canada, Mexico and the US, with SoFi Stadium in Inglewood hosting eight games and Levi’s Stadium hosting six.
“The Super Bowl provided opportunities to increase awareness and relationships 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 preparedness is based on a broader understanding of what drives human trafficking at major sporting events.
Events such as the Super Bowl and the World Cup in themselves do not cause an increase in sex trafficking. Instead, authorities say, the influx of money and tourists creates conditions that smugglers seem to take advantage of.
The Super Bowl inspired the creation of a team 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 non-profit organizations including In Our Backyard and the National Center for Exploited Missing Children.
In San Mateo County, 20 victims were found; Contra Costa County, 17; and in Santa Clara County, seven victims were found, two traffickers were arrested, and a gun was seized, according to authorities.
The task force is now using the same regional coordination model for World Cup preparations. Singleton said his group is already working with groups in cities that are involved in hosting Cup games, including the Los Angeles Human Trafficking Task Force.
However, the World Cup brings another challenge that the Super Bowl did not match in scale.
The fan base is all over the world. Millions of visitors will come from countries where sex-trafficking laws and cultural awareness about the issue are very different from those in the United States, Singleton said.
“Another obstacle is creating cultural awareness about sex trafficking for people who may be familiar with different laws in their country about asking for sex,” he said.
To move forward, the staff is taking the message directly to where the fans will start coming. Outreach efforts are planned at airports, billboard campaigns are underway, and the team is reaching out to foreign embassies to help spread the word around the world.
Singleton acknowledged that sustaining the integrated, multi-agency model beyond the World Cup will be difficult once the lights dim. Funding issues and staffing shortages are real obstacles that don’t make the headlines in the way big projects get done.
Looking ahead, the stakes extend beyond the World Cup. Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Olympics, an event that will attract the largest economic influx and the widest international crowd in a long time.
