Brown & Root: You and your inhumane warehouse jails are not welcome in Kansas City.

Kansas City's elected officials want us to believe that we need a new jail built in time for the World Cup. To fast-track this new jail, they contracted you, Brown & Root, to do their dirty work. Even those same councilmembers have criticized your jail as you build it, likening it to an ICE warehouse detention center.
But the people of Kansas City have done their homework. We know who you are, and we know about the horror that your company and your jails have caused people around the world.

Our demand is clear: Get out and stop construction immediately. We don't want Brown & Root or your World Cup jail in Kansas City.

Not only does this contract extract from local labor by skirting around prevailing wage requirements but Brown & Root has a well-documented violent history as part of Kellogg, Brown & Root—the military contractor with one of the most horrifying corporate records in modern American history. What makes KBR so horrifying?

- A jury found KBR knowingly exposed U.S. soldiers to hexavalent chromium—a deadly chemical—and awarded them $85 million in damages. Hundreds more veterans have sued KBR for operating open-air burn pits (including anything from human corpses to asbestos) that caused respiratory disease, cancer, neurological disorders, and death.

- Jamie Leigh Jones, 19 years old and four days into her job, alleges she was drugged and gang-raped by KBR employees. She says KBR employees held her hostage in a shipping container under armed guard to silence her.

- The families of twelve Nepali men sued KBR after the company and its subcontractors trafficked them to Iraq under false pretenses. As a result, all twelve men were executed and their murders were filmed and distributed to international media.

- Guantanamo Bay - Yes, KBR is literally the company responsible for building the torture camps where the United States has tortured nearly 800 people over two decades through waterboarding, sexual humiliation, prolonged isolation, and psychological abuse.

If the World Cup is meant to be a time for people from across the globe to come together in celebration, allowing a company with a history like yours to build a jail in our city is clearly not in alignment with what the World Cup is about. Kansas City deserves to be proud to be a host of the World Cup, but having a jail in our community built by Brown & Root is nothing to be proud of. Politicians want to pay you $25 million to build these cages, but we know the people of Kansas City don't want their tax dollars going to a jail built by an evil, torturous company like yours. Get out, Brown & Root. We don't want you or your World Cup Jail.