Unprecedented

NEW YORK — The World Cup, a 48-team, 104-match behemoth kicking off this week in Los Angeles and across 15 other cities in the United States, Mexico and Canada, presents an unprecedented security challenge, with more countries, games and a larger footprint than ever before.

It also comes against the backdrop of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, mounting political violence in President Trump’s orbit and growing fears of artificial intelligence-fueled disruptions, creating a complex threat environment for authorities.

Overseeing the sprawling security apparatus is a legion of federal agencies, state and local police departments and private entities. Their responsibilities range from securing stadiums and fan zones to escorting teams and protecting dignitaries.

Their tools include hunter drones that can shoot nets over objects in restricted airspace, bag-inspecting robot dogs, giant X-ray trucks and thousands of AI-powered cameras trained on public spaces soon to be thronged by fans.

In the U.S., it’s “78 Super Bowls over 39 days,” said Andrew Giuliani, executive director of Trump’s World Cup task force, which is overseeing the multiagency effort.

“There’s never been a summer like this in American history from a security angle,” said Giuliani, son of former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. “We’re as prepared as we can be.”

Collaborative effort

The tournament has the same high-level federal security designation as the Super Bowl, just below a presidential inauguration or a national political convention, ensuring federal, state and local coordination. It coincides with other major events linked to the 250th anniversary of America’s founding.

So far, Giuliani said, there are no credible threats.

The Department of Homeland Security, focused on Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown and with a funding lapse only recently resolved, estimates that as many as 7 million people will visit the United States for the World Cup.

The U.S. Secret Service, under scrutiny after security breaches and attempts on Trump’s life, is in charge of protecting world leaders who show up to cheer on their countries. Trump has expressed interest in attending a match.

“I feel very comfortable where we’re at, and we feel like we have a zero-fail mission,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Congress last week, noting that the Secret Service was understaffed by about 860 agents. “But it’s going to be complicated.”

Officials have indicated they are confident they can keep Trump safe because they will be integrating his usual security into the robust World Cup plan on days he may watch a match.

The FBI has spent two years developing its security plan, incorporating lessons from other major events such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and New Year’s Eve ball drop in New York and testing them at smaller ones, including last weekend’s Israel Day parade in the city.

“We prepare for the worst day,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Amit Kachhia-Patel in New York told the Associated Press. “And that’s how we go into any single event.”

To help cover security costs, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has distributed $625 million to the 11 U.S. host cities. An additional $250 million is being directed toward tracking and neutralizing suspect drones.

The disbursement of those funds was held up by the department’s funding delay in Congress, which the Trump administration has argued hindered security planning.

Others involved in the planning effort said the federal government could have played a more hands-on role even before the partial shutdown.

John Cohen, a former senior Homeland Security official who has been briefing state leaders before the matches, said the government was largely absent from planning meetings last year and did not begin sharing threat intelligence with host regions until recently.

“With an event of this magnitude, one would expect the federal government would’ve played a more active role,” Cohen said. “It felt like a missed opportunity to showcase that collaboration.”

Evolving threats from drones and AI

In January, thousands of officials involved in World Cup security gathered for exercises simulating crowd surges, vehicle attacks and mass shootings.

A month later, the U.S. and Israel launched a war with Iran.

“The security picture fundamentally changed,” said Stefano Ritondale, chief intelligence officer at Artorias, a defense intelligence company not involved in the security preparations. “There’s a major difference in preparing for a lone-wolf radical who rams his car into a public place and a terrorist who is bankrolled by a foreign country we’re at war with.”

Among the greatest concerns are drones.

Since the last World Cup in Qatar in 2022, drones have become a prominent weapon in conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine and Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“If there is one threat that keeps me up at night, it is from drones,” said New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, whose department is partnering with the FBI on drone mitigation.

Drones are prohibited over stadiums and fan zones, and Kachhia-Patel said the FBI has a “full suite of options” to thwart incursions. They include agents monitoring the sky and a “variety of means” to safely down the devices, he said without elaborating.

Before this year’s World Cup, the growing sophistication of AI videos was a particular concern, with officials warning that state actors can harness the technology to sow misinformation and panic.

On match days, the FBI will activate joint operations centers in each host city, bringing together local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to monitor and investigate threats.

“If there’s a video that shows an explosion going off at a site, and it’s AI-generated, we have people on the ground who can validate whether or not that’s true,” Kachhia-Patel said.

Opportunity for private tech

Some AI companies have pitched themselves to police departments in host cities, promising to comb through data and surveillance on game days to prevent threats, including unruly fan behavior.

“We know sports fanaticism around here in terms of the NFL and baseball to some extent, but nothing like international soccer,” said Jake Becchina, a police spokesperson in Kansas City, Mo., which is hosting six matches.

The department has contracted with Peregrine Technologies, which promises to sift through police data and publicly available information such as team practice locations and the country affiliation of popular bars, to get ahead of possible conflict.

In Dallas, a recent $120-million tech upgrade will give local police body cameras capable of real-time translations, helping law enforcement communicate with international visitors soon to descend on the region.

Several drone detection and mitigation companies are joining efforts to help federal agencies secure the skies.

One of those companies, Fortem, has claimed to have signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the Department of Homeland Security before the World Cup for an unusual drone mitigation strategy: quadcopters that can shoot nets at encroaching drones to trap them in midair. A Homeland Security spokesman declined to discuss the contract.

Just as the teams will aim to perform their best on the pitch, Giuliani said the security planning was a unique chance to “show off American exceptionalism.”

“If we do our job right,” Giuliani added, “nobody will be talking about security at the World Cup.”

Offenhartz, Sisak and Santana write for the Associated Press. Offenhartz and Sisak reported from New York, Santana from Washington. AP writer Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.

When a federal judge shot down a Trump administration policy of holding immigrants without bond last December, it seemed like a serious blow to the president’s mass deportation effort.

Instead, a top Justice Department official insisted the ruling wasn’t binding, and the administration continued denying detainees around the country a chance for release.

By February, the district court judge, Sunshine Sykes, was fed up. Sykes, a nominee of President Biden, accused Trump officials in a ruling that month of seeking “to erode any semblance of separation of powers,” adding that they could “only do so in a world where the Constitution does not exist.”

Hardly isolated, the case illustrates a broader pattern of defiance of lower court decisions in President Trump’s second term.

The failure of Trump officials to follow court orders has been highlighted most notably in individual immigration cases. But a review of hundreds of pages of court records by the Associated Press also shows an extraordinary record of violations in lawsuits over policy changes and other moves.

In the administration’s first 15 months in office, district court judges ruled it was violating an order in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices, the AP’s review of court records found. That’s about 1 out of every 8 lawsuits in which courts have at least temporarily blocked the administration’s actions.

The Trump administration’s power struggle with federal courts — which is testing basic tenets of U.S. democracy — reflects an expansive view of executive authority that has also challenged the independence of federal agencies, a president’s ethical obligations and the U.S. role in the international order.

Widespread noncompliance found

The Trump administration violations in the 31 lawsuits are in addition to more than 250 instances of noncompliance that judges have recently highlighted in individual immigration petitions — including failing to return property and keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.

Legal scholars and former federal judges said they could recall at most a few violations of court rulings over the full four-year terms of other recent presidential administrations, including Trump’s first time in office. They also noted previous administrations were generally apologetic when confronted by judges; the Trump administration’s Justice Department has been combative in some cases.

“What the court system is experiencing in the last year and a half is just qualitatively completely different from anything that’s preceded it,” said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University who studies federal courts and is tracking litigation against the Trump administration.

Though Trump officials eventually backed down in about a third of the 31 lawsuits, legal experts say their treatment of court orders poses serious dangers.

“The federal government should be the institution most devoted to the rule of law in this country,” said David Super, a constitutional law scholar at Georgetown University. “When it ceases to feel itself bound, respect for the rule of law is likely to break down across the country.”

The White House’s aggressive policy moves have prompted a barrage of lawsuits — more than 700 and counting.

Higher courts boost Trump efforts

The AP’s review also found that higher courts, including the Supreme Court, overruled the district courts and sided with the White House in nearly half of the 31 cases. Critics say those decisions are emboldening the administration to ignore judges’ orders.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the higher courts had overturned “unlawful district court rulings.” The administration will “continue to comply with lawful court rulings,” she added in a written statement.

“President Trump’s entire Administration is lawfully implementing the America First agenda he was elected to enact,” the statement said.

Among other instances of noncompliance, judges found the White House defied rulings when it deported scores of accused gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador, withheld billions of dollars in foreign aid and failed to restore programming at the Voice of America. The three cases date to the first few months of the new administration, but judges have continued to find violations since then, including in two cases in April.

“The danger is that this gets normalized,” said JoAnna Suriani, counsel at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, which is tracking noncompliance cases. The group is also involved in litigation against the administration.

‘Ham-handed,’ ‘hallucinating’

In October, U.S. District Judge William Smith took little time to conclude Homeland Security officials were flouting one of his orders. Smith, a nominee of President George W. Bush, had blocked them from making billions of dollars in disaster relief funding to states contingent on cooperation with the president’s immigration priorities.

The Department of Homeland Security responded by keeping the immigration requirement on some grants, but making it contingent on a higher court overriding Smith’s injunction. The judge called the move “ham-handed” and said the agency was trying to “bully the states.”

In a case over the suspension of refugee admissions, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead, a Biden nominee, accused the Justice Department last May of “hallucinating new text” in an appellate court order and “rewriting” it to achieve the government’s preferred outcome.

In four additional cases the AP reviewed, judges stopped short of a clear written finding of noncompliance but still criticized the administration’s response to their orders.

Of the judges who have confirmed violations, 22 were appointed by Democratic presidents and seven by Republican presidents.

Former federal judges Jeremy Fogel and Liam O’Grady said jurists are losing trust in the integrity of the Department of Justice.

That’s making them “more aggressive in accusing the government of bad faith,” said O’Grady, who along with Fogel is part of the nonpartisan democracy group Keep Our Republic.

Fogel said judges are also getting frustrated.

“They make orders and the orders don’t get complied with, and then they have to inquire why the orders are not being complied with, and that’s where it gets very mushy and very political,” he said.

Education case raises alarms

In Eureka, Calif., school administrator Lisa Claussen is worried about the impact on her students’ mental health if a judge does not find the Education Department in violation of a court order on federal grants.

Grant money allowed the school district in the poor coastal community in Northern California to hire more than a dozen psychologists and social workers to help students struggling with drug use and suicidal thoughts.

Education officials in the Trump administration told schools in California and other states last year that it was discontinuing the grants; the administration opposed diversity considerations in the grant process.

U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson blocked the move permanently in December, but California and 15 other states now say the administration is making an end run around her injunction by imposing new rules, including an initial limit of six months of funding.

Attorneys for the Education Department said they wanted to see whether schools were making progress on performance goals before releasing additional funds. The judge’s order did not block the six-month limit, they added in a court filing.

Evanson, a Biden nominee, has yet to rule.

In the absence of a one-year funding guarantee, Eureka City Schools and other districts say they have already issued layoff notices to mental health providers or eliminated positions.

“We have many kids who don’t trust adults for very good reason, and to be able to just swipe this grant like they’re doing … ,” Claussen said in a phone interview, her voice trailing off. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

Justice Department response

In court filings, Justice Department attorneys have generally disputed accusations that the government was not complying. They have argued over the meaning of words, cited favorable appellate court rulings and said they were acting outside the scope of the court’s order, among other legal maneuvering.

Outside of court, Trump and White House officials have railed against federal judges. Vice President JD Vance has even suggested the president could ignore court orders.

Will Chamberlain, senior counsel with the conservative legal advocacy group the Article III Project, said many of the judges who have found violations are ignoring laws that clearly prohibit their rulings.

Trump officials are “generally complying, appealing and winning,” he said. “If they were defying orders left and right, they’d be losing them.”

A justice’s rebuke

In March, a federal appeals court ruled Sykes, the judge in California, had probably exceeded her authority in requiring bond hearings nationwide and blocked her February decision.

The outcome was not unusual.

In 15 of the 31 lawsuits the AP reviewed, an appellate court or the Supreme Court either allowed the administration’s underlying policy, limited the district court’s efforts to correct or punish the noncompliance, or both.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized her fellow justices after one such ruling.

“This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last,” she wrote in June in a dissent joined by the court’s two other liberal justices. “Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.”

Thanawala writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Michael Casey in Boston contributed to this report.