LOS ANGELES — A growing number of international leaders are suggesting it's time to reconsider the idea of playing the World Cup in the United States this summer.

Oke Gottlich, vice president of the German Football Association, told a German newspaper last week that he wants to discuss a boycott of the tournament, much like the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

"By my reckoning," Gottlich said, "the potential threat is greater now than it was then. We need to have this discussion."

Politicians in Britain and France had already raised the idea of a World Cup boycott. But now the whispers are growing into a chorus.

Nearly two dozen European football association heads held informal talks in Budapest last week to discuss their participation in the World Cup. A veteran coach of several African national teams urged a boycott, and a United Nations diplomat and international law expert has canceled his World Cup tickets, fearing for his safety in the U.S. amid violent federal immigration crackdowns in Minnesota and other cities throughout the United States.

"ICE may decide that I am a gang member and I'll be locked in prison for a year with no charges, no hearing, no trial, no right to consult a lawyer, no phone call," Mohamad Safa, the Lebanese-born executive director of the U.N. organization Patriotic Vision, wrote in a social media post.

Saturday's killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was the second fatal shooting by federal agents in 16 days in Minneapolis. Since September, federal immigration officers have shot 12 people.

"The U.S.," Safa wrote "is not safe to visit."

What worries soccer officials, politicians and diplomats isn't just ICE's aggression. It's also the mercurial and unpredictable actions of President Trump, who in the last month ordered the extraction of the president of Venezuela, threatened military action against Iran, fired on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, paused U.S. visa applications for citizens of 75 countries and insisted that the U.S. had to acquire Greenland.

"Seriously, can we imagine playing the World Cup in a country that attacks its neighbors, threatened to invade Greenland, disregards international law, wants to undermine the U.N. [and] establishes a fascist and racist militia in its own country?" asked Eric Coquerel, a member of the French parliament representing the left-wing La France Insoumise party.

FIFA officials declined to comment when asked about the growing calls for a U.S. World Cup boycott.

Coverage of the violence in Minnesota is leading the evening news and driving debate in Europe, said Andrew Bertoli, an assistant professor at IE University in Segovia, Spain and an expert on the social and political effects of sports.

"The view that I've seen over here is one of great concern for what's happening in the U.S.," said Bertoli, who was educated at UC Berkeley and Notre Dame and held a postdoctoral fellowship at USC.

Regardless of the level of shock or surprise, however, Bertoli doesn't believe a boycott is warranted.

The last World Cup, Bertoli notes, was held in Qatar, an energy-rich constitutional monarchy where freedom of association and expression is heavily restricted and thousands of migrant workers are held in conditions that have been likened to slavery or servitude. The one before that was played in Russia.

Both tournaments went on without a peep from FIFA about human rights violations or Russia's occupation of Crimea, which was in its fourth year when the World Cup kicked off in Moscow. So there's no chance FIFA President Gianni Infantino will move games out of the U.S. — not after he awarded Trump the first FIFA peace prize last month.

Bertoli says Trump's bellicosity and the violent encounters with ICE inspired fear largely because the rest of the world holds the U.S. to a higher standard than Qatar or Russia.

"When people see what's happening in the United States right now, a lot of them are shocked," Bertoli said by phone from Spain. "They didn't think something like that could happen in the United States."

"If you're going to rank countries in terms of human rights issues," he added, "the United States is better than most by quite a lot."

That's true. But even if teams come to the U.S. for World Cup matches as scheduled, that doesn't mean their supporters will attend those games. And if the international backlash against Trump and ICE continues, the likelihood that international fans will rethink their travel plans will increase. Since the start of Trump's second term, more than a dozen countries — including staunch American allies such as Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand — have issued warnings about visiting the U.S.

Despite the tensions, this summer's World Cup, which will be shared with Canada and Mexico, will shatter the all-time attendance record and FIFA's revenue from the four-year tournament cycle will top $11 billion.

However, local organizers have reasons to be concerned because if foreign visitors are scared away, the vast majority of the seats in those stadiums — at least in the 11 U.S. venues — will then be filled by domestic fans who won't be paying for as many plane flights, hotel rooms, rental cars or restaurant meals.

The U.S. government has added further confusion to the international visitor process. This month's indefinite pause on processing immigrant-visa applications for nationals of 75 countries follows an earlier ban that restricted travel to the U.S. for citizens of 39 countries, including Haiti, Iran, Senegal and Ivory Coast, all of whom have qualified for the World Cup. While the U.S. promised some exemptions to the ban, the State Department cautioned those would be limited for World Cup ticket holders and the process remains unclear.

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