Donald Trump claims he does not know who Bad Bunny is. “I’ve never heard of him,” the U.S. president said a few months ago about the most listened-to artist in the world. The Republican considers the NFL’s decision to select the Puerto Rican superstar for the Super Bowl halftime show to be “terrible” and “ridiculous” and, in the midst of his tantrum, declined to travel to the biggest sporting event in the United States, which he attended last year.
At a time when little escapes the control of the most powerful man in the world — obsessed with carrying out the largest deportation in history, even if it means that U.S. citizens die in the crossfire and the country’s laws are pushed to their breaking point — Bad Bunny’s halftime show promises to give, at least for a moment, a chance to breathe to the more than 65 million Latinos in the United States who have lived through a year of persecution, terror, and anguish.
When the NFL announced its unprecedented selection for the show last September — one of the most-watched events in the world each year — the Trump administration all but declared war on the league. “They won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe. And they’re so weak, we’re going to fix it,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who is responsible for carrying out the president’s anti-immigrant agenda. One of her advisers added that it was “shameful” that the NFL had chosen “someone who just seems to hate America so much.”
For the White House, “hating” the country means opposing Trump’s policies. In the case of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 31), the singer has repeatedly provoked the ire of the Republican administration for speaking out against its crusade against immigration. However, despite criticism from the government, the NFL has defended its decision. “I’m not sure we’ve ever selected an artist where we didn’t have some blowback or criticism,” said league commissioner Roger Goodell in October. In 2024, for example, the show was headlined by rapper Kendrick Lamar, who turned it into a powerful social critique of the state of the country.
“We’re confident it’s going to be a great show,” Goodell said about Bad Bunny’s concert, adding that “it’s going to be exciting and a united moment.”
It will be 13 minutes watched live by more than 300 million people around the world. Little is known about what Martínez Ocasio has planned for what is expected to be the first Super Bowl halftime show performed entirely in Spanish — a language that, under Trump, has become an excuse to harass and detain hundreds of thousands of migrants, regardless of whether they were in the country legally or had spent decades building a life and contributing to the national economy.
What little Bad Bunny — known for keeping his plans under tight wraps and always capable of surprising with his originality — has revealed is that it will be a “huge party,” and he just wants people “to have fun.” “I know I told them that they had four months to learn Spanish, but they don’t even have to learn Spanish; it’s better if they learn to dance,” he said on Thursday at a press conference where he offered few details. When asked whether he would have guests, as he himself was in 2020 during the show headlined by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez, he replied: “A lot… All the Latino community around the world that supports me and the whole country.”
The show will be an extension of his latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, released in 2025, which earlier this month became the first Spanish-language album to receive the most prestigious award in music: the Grammy for Album of the Year. The essence of the project — Puerto Rican culture — was captured in a promotional video the singer shared in January as a Super Bowl teaser. “On February 8, the world will dance,” he wrote on Instagram alongside the clip, which features his song BAILE INoLVIDABLE, a salsa which people of different races and ages dance with him beneath the shade of a red flamboyán, a tree symbolic of his home island.
“It’s the most special project that I have ever done because it brought me here, and I wasn’t looking for anything. I wasn’t looking for Album of the Year at the Grammys or the Latin Grammys. I wasn’t looking to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show. I was just looking to connect with my roots, to connect with my people more than ever, to connect with myself — with my history, with my culture,” he explained about DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS at Thursday’s press conference. And the fact that people have enjoyed it so much, he said, “confirms that you should always be proud of who you are and where you come from.”
There’s no doubt that the show will also be a love letter to Puerto Rico, just as Martínez Ocasio’s entire career has been — especially his most recent musical phase. Ten years ago, Bad Bunny, or simply Benito to his compatriots, was just a 21-year-old working as a bagger at a supermarket while studying at a local university and uploading music to SoundCloud. Now he is coming off 31 sold-out concerts in Puerto Rico during a historic residency that last summer generated an estimated $713 million in economic impact and drew half a million fans. The final concert was livestreamed on Amazon and became the most-watched single-artist performance on the platform to date.
He is also in the middle of a world tour for his latest album, which began last November in Latin America and will end in July in Europe. It does not include shows in the continental United States, making the Super Bowl halftime show his only stop in the country. Bad Bunny has explained that he decided not to perform elsewhere in the U.S. because of the possibility that the Trump administration could send its immigration police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to venues to detain migrants. “There was the issue of — like, fucking ICE could be outside. And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about,” the artist said in an interview last September.
That same concern will hang in the air this Sunday. The NFL has assured that there are no immigration enforcement operations planned at the stadium in Santa Clara, California, where the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks will face off in the NFL championship game. But those assurances have done little to calm the fears of attendees and of those who will gather across the country at watch parties to see Bad Bunny’s show — especially after Trump administration officials as senior as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said a few months ago that immigration agents would be “all over” during the game.
“ICE out”
In the days leading up to the final, posters began appearing around the San Francisco Bay Area denouncing the immigration police with slogans such as “Fuck ICE” or “Chinga la migra.” They feature the image of the sapo concho, or crested toad, a species native to Puerto Rico that over the past year has become a symbol of Bad Bunny. The amphibian’s image has appeared in his music videos and accompanied him at all his concerts. On the posters in California, the toad wears around its neck one of the whistles that neighbors and activists across the country use to sound the alarm when they spot an ICE agent.
The Puerto Rican’s performance on the most important stage in the United States — and one of the biggest in the world — comes amid an unprecedented campaign against immigration. The offensive launched by the White House has spread terror through the country’s streets, with massive, indiscriminate raids; people detained solely because of the color of their skin or their accent; and agents who beat and even shoot those who dare to stand in their way. The first 12 months of Trump’s second presidency have resulted in 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million self-deportations, while more than 70,000 migrants remained in detention at the end of January.
The impact on the Latino community has been tremendous. An analysis by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) found in October that Latinos accounted for nine out of every 10 ICE detentions during the first six months of 2025. In a follow-up report published last month, it details that Latinos without criminal records detained under Trump tend to spend longer periods in detention and are transferred more frequently between facilities, while also being more likely to end up incarcerated in other states, far from their families and lawyers.
In response to the federal offensive, protests have multiplied across the nation, particularly since January, after federal agents deployed in Minneapolis — the latest epicenter of the president’s crackdown — killed two U.S. citizens in two separate shootings in less than a month. So far, in the Bay Area there have been no major raids like those carried out in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Even so, pro-immigrant organizations in the area have trained hundreds of volunteers to monitor the Santa Clara stadium this Sunday and patrol predominantly Latino neighborhoods in case immigration agents show up.
Bad Bunny has made it clear that, for him, the agents are not welcome: “ICE out,” he said on Grammy night, when he dedicated one of his awards “to all the people who have had to leave their country.” “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans,” added the Puerto Rican singer, who is also a U.S. citizen, since his homeland is a territory of the United States.
It is a fact that the MAGA universe has yet to fully grasp. After Trump’s criticism of the choice of Martínez Ocasio for the Super Bowl, the conservative group founded by the now-deceased far-right activist Charlie Kirk organized a concert parallel to Bad Bunny’s, calling it the “All-American Halftime Show,” overlooking the artist’s U.S. citizenship. The headliner will be Kid Rock, one of the most visible artists of the Make America Great Again movement. All signs point to this being the show Trump will watch. “The president would much prefer a Kid Rock performance over Bad Bunny,” the White House press secretary said this week.
Meanwhile, in Santa Clara, nearly 6,000 kilometers from Puerto Rico, Benito will once again declare what he already said during his residency back home a few months ago: “I don’t want to leave here.” This Sunday, that feeling will also be shared by the millions of Latinos who have made the United States — a country created by migrants — their home.
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