The Enthusiasm — and Scorn — Surrounding Bad Bunny’s Star Turn at the Super Bowl

The Washington Post

15:00 JST, February 8, 2026

Puerto Rican native Ray Sanchez generally supports President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. But at a Super Bowl party Sunday, the 60-year-old auto industry consultant will be rooting for the latest target of their culture war: Bad Bunny, the superstar headlining the halftime show.

Sanchez called his fellow Puerto Rican’s chance to showcase Latin music on the NFL’s biggest stage an extraordinary triumph for a U.S. territory whose people have struggled to win the same rights as other American citizens. Never mind that some conservatives are boycotting the performance over his outspoken politics and criticism of Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda.

“Being against Bad Bunny is absurd,” said Sanchez, who expects hundreds to attend the party in San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital. “There is no one in music who has gone as far as he has in promoting our culture.”

The halftime show in Santa Clara, California, before a global television audience expected to top 100 million, is an opportunity for the 31-year-old artist, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, to go even further. Across the country, Latino fans say they are anticipating a raucous performance that celebrates their immigrant heritage and provides a moment of joy and emotional release at a time when many in their communities are living in fear of the Trump administration’s mass deportation operation.

While he is performing, Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, will hold an alternative “All-American Halftime Show” featuring Michigan-born Kid Rock, a longtime Trump supporter, to stream on social media.

Even if Bad Bunny doesn’t use the stage to explicitly condemn Trump’s deportation campaign, the dueling shows will highlight the nation’s deep divide over immigration, and his performance is likely to be viewed through that lens.

“Him just being there is a very political statement in this moment, given what we’re seeing everywhere else,” said Ana Sofía Peláez, a Cuban American nonprofit leader in Miami who is making a Puerto Rican coconut custard, known as tembleque, for her guests at a “Benito Bowl” party on Sunday.

Bad Bunny’s music, including “Debí Tirar Mas Fotos,” which this week became the first Spanish-language recording to win the Grammy award for best album, is layered in political commentary and symbolism about Puerto Rico’s second-tier status as a longtime Spanish colony and now U.S. territory, and the struggles of its people to overcome it.

But it was Bad Bunny’s defiant, two-word statement at the Grammys – “ICE out” – that thrust him into the inflamed national debate over the aggressive tactics of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And his dedication of the award to immigrants who “leave their home, land, their country, to follow their dreams” stood as an implicit rebuke of the president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The progressive Working Families Party is holding Super Bowl viewing parties in Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California in support of Bad Bunny. Nelini Stamp, the group’s national director of strategy, said the goal is to raise awareness among Latinos about actions they can take to combat the Trump administration’s deportation agenda, including lobbying Congress to limit ICE’s funding.

Bad Bunny’s critics are targeting him “because he is Latino, because he speaks Spanish,” said Stamp, who is half Puerto Rican. Godoy, a Mexican American designer who goes by one name, is hosting one of the parties in Los Angeles and likened the event to a quinceañera, a traditional Latin American birthday celebration. He spent days creating custom Bad Bunny football jerseys for the party, which will feature Puerto Rican drag performers April Carrión and Jessica Wild.

The enthusiasm of Bad Bunny’s fans has been met with equal amounts of disdain from Trump supporters who have accused the nation’s most popular sports league of catering to liberals, and denigrated Bad Bunny for singing in Spanish and not representing their vision of American values. Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren falsely suggested he is not a U.S. citizen, even though people born in Puerto Rico have automatic citizenship. One Million Moms, a Christian group, announced a boycott of his performance over his support of LGBTQ+ rights.

“We want to celebrate America; we do not want to crap on it,” Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet said, previewing the organization’s alternative halftime event on “The Charlie Kirk Show.” “When the other guys are doing their queer celebration, speaking Spanish – whatever you want to do, that’s fine – but we’re going to be celebrating this country.”

The controversy has threatened to intrude on preparations for the game. An anonymous survey this week of NFL players by the Athletic found that nearly 59 percent support the selection of Bad Bunny as the featured act, while 41 percent oppose it. Asked about Bad Bunny’s comments at the Grammys, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell called him “one of the greatest artists in the world” but suggested he won’t make his performance explicitly political.

The performer understands that the Super Bowl “is used to unite people and [for artists] to be able to bring people together with their creativity, with their talents,” Goodell said.

The NFL announced Bad Bunny’s selection in September. He had made a cameo appearance during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2020 featuring Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. And his breakout success since then has catapulted him to the heights of pop culture influence – attractive to a sports league that has sought to expand its appeal to Spanish-speaking audiences and launched an initiative that showcases the contributions that Latino players and coaches have made to the community.

Mexico, where the NFL has held four regular season games in the past decade, consistently ranks among its biggest international audiences.

“My sense is that he will lean heavily into the pro-immigrant narrative – a narrative that historically has been that America is a land of migrants and that immigrants built this country,” said Albert Laguna, an associate professor of American Studies at Yale University. Last fall, Laguna taught a class on Bad Bunny’s cultural and political impact in which his students explored the themes of what it means to be an American and who qualifies to be one.

“Trump and others on that side of the aisle have been espousing a particular view of Americanness that does not include Bad Bunny,” he said. “Whereas Bad Bunny, if you saw his trailer for the Super Bowl, is all about inclusivity – he’s dancing with every kind of person.”

Bad Bunny’s music focuses on Puerto Rico’s struggles with gentrification and the departure of its people to the U.S. mainland, featuring a mix of reggaeton rhythms alongside plena, salsa, bomba and other Puerto Rican and Caribbean sounds that create an homage to his musical heritage. His most recent album’s title translates to “I should’ve taken more pictures,” and some of its songs express nostalgia for lost love and homelands left behind.

He has been outspoken politically for years, condemning the Trump administration’s emergency response to Hurricane Maria that devastated the island in 2017 during the president’s first term. He endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign in 2024.

MAGA figures were incensed by Bad Bunny’s comments last year that part of the reason he was not touring in the U.S. mainland was concern that his concerts would become a target for ICE raids. Trump lambasted his selection for the Super Bowl as “terrible” and “absolutely ridiculous,” and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem pledged to send immigration officers “all over the place” at the Super Bowl.

Trump administration figures have rallied behind the idea of an alternative halftime show. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked on social media this week how his agency could get involved in the Turning Point concert.

“I think the military should do a Fly Over [at] the actual Super Bowl to remind Bad Bunny that this is America,” Turning Point executive Tyler Bowyer replied. “Make it loud, while all of America watches this one.”

It is not clear whether Hegseth is planning anything. Turning Point did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Tump’s approval ratings on immigration have plummeted in recent weeks amid increased public protests of ICE after the fatal shootings last month of two U.S. citizens by immigration officers in Minneapolis. The Department of Homeland Security told NFL officials recently that it had no immigration operations planned in connection with the game.

Sanchez, the Trump supporter in San Juan, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Bad Bunny makes subtle or explicit remarks against ICE at the Super Bowl. A longtime advocate for Puerto Rican statehood, he has soured on the administration’s negative generalizations of immigrants and ICE raids in Puerto Rico largely targeting the undocumented Haitian and Dominican populations.

“I think what ICE has been doing is a grave error for the Republican Party, to be hunting people in this way,” Sanchez said. “There was a more subtle and correct way for dealing with illegal immigration.”

To Peláez, the Miami nonprofit leader, the criticism of Bad Bunny from Trump supporters is misguided, but she is too busy getting ready for her Super Bowl party to focus on the politics. In addition to the custard, she has ordered a platter of plantains and corn- and meat-filled fritters, and borrowed her cousin’s Caribbean bean dip recipe.

Peláez recalled her youth when the Super Bowl halftime show was “one of these moments that is part of American life where everybody is invested and witnessing a … monocultural experience. It’s a sign of the times that we are going to have separate concerts.”

But she has no doubt that Bad Bunny will get more viewers: “We can all read the Spotify charts.”