Security Planners Brace For Unprecedented Threats As Millions Head To 11 US World Cup Cities

Millions of soccer fans are expected to gather in 11 U.S. cities for the World Cup, and security planners have been coordinating with state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies to monitor unprecedented security threats.

“This is not just one national or one continental event," said Andrew Giuliani, the executive director of the White House Task Force on the World Cup. “For us in the United States, these are 11 regional events. And so we rely on the expertise of law enforcement in these areas to also understand the intricacies of this and come in with federal resources.”

The expanded tournament kicking off next week will include 48 teams, 104 matches, and three host nations. Giuliani spoke Thursday at a World Cup kickoff event about the security challenges of preparing for an event of this magnitude, from monitoring trends across states to heat mitigation.

“We also want to make sure that we’re not siloing off Miami from Seattle,” Giuliani said, “because if a beat cop is seeing something in Miami Beach, let’s say, or in Miami downtown, that somebody in Seattle is also seeing, we need to make sure that we are deconflicting that information if there’s more of a trend that could be threatening to our other host cities. So that’s where the complexity of this lies.”

Preparations have been ramping up for months. Giuliani and members of the task force have attended major U.S. events, including the College Football Playoff championship game in January, to observe how host cities coordinate security and logistics.

Host cities also received $625 million in federal security funding to bolster preparations, and Giuliani said some of that money will be used to reimburse law enforcement officials for extra security measures.

A recent challenge planners are monitoring is an outbreak of a rare type of Ebola virus that has plagued Congo and Uganda. The World Health Organization has declared it a public health emergency of international concern.

Giuliani said security officials confirmed with the Congolese national team that they haven't been in the region for more than 21 days, and they have warned the team not to add anyone to its training camp who has been in Congo in the past three weeks.

“If they were to do that, and if anybody were to become symptomatic, they would threaten not being able to travel to Houston for the World Cup,” he said.

Congo had already canceled a three-day World Cup preparation training camp and a planned farewell to fans in the capital, Kinshasa, because of the outbreak. And it was working on finding a way to play its qualifier against Chile after the mayor of the Spanish city of La Linea de la Concepcion denied authorization for the match because of health concerns related to the outbreak.

Federal officials are also discussing FIFA's change of policy to bar fans from bringing refillable water bottles into the tournament’s 16 stadiums across North America, including some with limited or no shade.

“Certainly understanding that fans with bottles — if anything is frozen there, they can throw that, utilize it as a weapon,” Giuliani said, adding later: “We want to make sure that fans have access to water, so that way they can be hydrated. We also want to make sure that everybody is safe and that people can’t bring a weapon in there. So those conversations are still ongoing.”