Artists across the US have been protesting against law enforcement raids, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, in US cities staging the six-week long Men’s World Cup football tournament. National teams of 48 countries, from six continents, have been playing in Canada, Mexico, and mostly in the US: the final game is played in New Jersey on 19 July 2026. Thousands of visitors have travelled to the event from around the world.
In the weeks before the first game on 11 June, the Department of Homeland Security announced that ICE agents would be deployed throughout the tournament in an effort to ‘crack down on criminal activities’: counterfeit tickets, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and counterfeit products. In a direct response, a ‘No ICE in the Cup’ campaign was initiated to ‘motivate people through art when the world would be watching’.
Artists from ten of the eleven US cities hosting games were commissioned to design posters reflecting the campaign’s titular rallying cry, ideally applied to their city. For Seattle, the birthplace of Starbucks, iced-coffee is the image; Los Angeles, a man wearing a green Mexico-badged team shirt is depicted being pulled by many arms; New York, instead of tackling each other, opposing team players confront ICE agents in riot gear; Dallas, an ICE agent goalkeeper is hit in the face by a fiercely kicked ball; and for Miami, an alligator crushes a ball in its jaws, and the text reads ‘no Ice in our waters”.
Further artists responded to an open call to submit designs. Posters were published as free digital downloads on the campaign’s platform. Remixing, adapting and upscaling the artwork was encouraged for distribution. Artist’s networks were invited to print and sell for the benefit of immigrant aid funds. Digitised versions were distributed on social media platforms. The campaign’s objectives and tactics chime with the nationwide ‘Fall of Freedom’ movement, launched in November 2025, by US artists and cultural workers protesting against President Trump’s ‘fascism and censorship’: its slogan is ‘Art matters. Artists are a threat to American fascism’.
Since January 2025, when Trump was inaugurated for a second presidential term, his administration has aggressively reshaped the ICE agency. Formed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ICE’s initial remit was to conduct civil immigration enforcement inside the US: locating, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants. Trump transformed ICE into an aggressive mass deportation mechanism: rather than strictly targeting individuals with serious criminal records, ICE operations have targeted millions of undocumented immigrants across the US. There has been widespread public antagonism towards ICE’s violent activities in cities, especially terrorising immigrant communities.
There was national and worldwide media coverage of ICE’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’ into Minneapolis from December 2025 to February 2026, when bystanders filmed ICE agents shooting and killing two US citizens. In April, scores of civil society groups warned overseas visitors about ICE’s behaviour, especially the ‘arbitrary denial of entry and risk of arrest, detention and/or deportation’ – some travellers from Canada and Europe were in fact held for days or weeks in ICE detention centres. A week before the tournament’s first game, a joint poll by the Washington Post and University of Maryland found that the majority of Americans opposed ICE agents being present at World Cup stadiums. In June, the American Hotel and Lodging Association reported ‘lower-than-expected’ hotel bookings in host cities, saying the risk of ICE detention was a contributory factor.
Over the past 18 months, Trump has also radically reshaped federal arts and cultural policies, by removing ‘improper ideology’ from public institutions; and targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, specific artistic themes, and the leadership of major cultural agencies. His administration has initiated steps to alter or remove artwork and historical materials deemed ‘divisive’ or not aligning with ‘American exceptionalism’. A government directive ordered a review of the 19 Smithsonian museums, aimed at altering exhibits covering such topics as slavery and immigration. At the US National Portrait Gallery, the artist Amy Sherald withdrew her exhibition, following pressure to alter her work Trans Forming Liberty, 2024: a painting of the model and performance artist, Arewà Basit, portrayed as a Black transgender Statue of Liberty.
Moreover, the official White House portrait of former President Obama was replaced with a painting of the assassination attempt on Trump in 2024. The National Park Service removed references to ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ from the website of the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. It is the first US National Park site dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights and history, was officially designated by President Obama in 2016, and commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Uprising – a landmark milestone that ignited the modern fight for LGBTQ+ civil rights in the US.
Trump’s policies echo the repressive playbook of fascist and communist totalitarian regimes over the past hundred years. Francisco Franco, fascist dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975, was supported by likeminded fellow despots: Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy to 1943, and Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany to 1945: all three mandated gross state-censorship of art and artists under their regimes; as did the USSR dictator Joseph Stalin from the 1930s until his death in 1953, and his successors through to Vladimir Putin – the de facto leader of the Russian Federation from 1999 to date.
Such regimes function as highly centralised authoritarian systems, eliminating political opposition, severely restricting civil liberties, and repressing independent media and freedom of expression. But despots always generate dissidents, who actively challenge established doctrines, policies, or institutions: notably publishers, filmmakers, writers, musicians and intellectuals. Visual artists are particularly effective at conveying messages that avoid state censorship. Just as Trump’s policies mirror despotic repression, so ‘No ICE in the Cup’ activities reflect dissident freedom of expression.
In 1930s Germany, Martin Niemöller was a prominent German Lutheran pastor, who turned away from his Nazi beliefs to become an outspoken critic of Hitler. Niemöller became a Dachau death camp survivor, and in 1946 penned a powerful warning of the perils of political passivity: ‘First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me’.
© Henry Lydiate 2026