During the Super Bowl, the Puerto Rican “King of Latin Trap” Bad Bunny performed at halftime. Jake Paul called Bad Bunny, aka Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a “fake American.” Paul is a boxer, influencer, actor, and racist Islamophobe. Ocasio had the temerity to sing in Spanish. Paul and MAGA were outraged, as were thousands of incensed others who posted to social media after the headline performance.

“Let’s rally together and show big corporations they can’t just do whatever they want without consequences,” Paul tweeted. “Turn off this halftime. A fake American citizen performing who publicly hates America.”

Ocasio is an American citizen. Puerto Ricans have held US citizenship since the 1917 Jones-Shafroth Act, but we can’t expect the followers of MAGA to know much about history, the law, and the brutal track record of colonialism.

MAGA may not like it, but Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States. More than 59 million people in America speak Spanish. More people speak Spanish than French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, and other languages combined. Spanish has been spoken since the 15^th century with the arrival of colonizers from Spain in what would later become America. The word “America” is the feminine form of the first word of Americus Vesputius, the Latinized name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

The president weighed in from the Oval Office. Trump said he would not watch the Super Bowl.

“I’m anti-them [Bad Bunny and the group Green Day]. I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible,” Trump declared.

Ocasio and Green Day criticized Trump’s immigration policy and its thuggish ICE mercenaries. Last year Green Day released “Nuevayol,” a song that featured an imitated Trump apologizing for his anti-immigrant stance. Green Day performed at the opening ceremony of Super Bowl LX.

The elephant in the room is the history of US colonialism in Latin America. Following a decisive victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War, the United States “acquired” Puerto Rico through armed disputation under the Treaty of Paris. The Foraker Act (1900) and the above mentioned Jones-Shafroth Act (1917) imposed US rule over the island. The latter was exploited to draft Puerto Ricans to fight in World War I (20,000 “Boricuas” were conscripted).

According to Samir Chopra, Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, more than a century after the war,

Puerto Ricans living on their island are not allowed to vote in presidential elections; Puerto Ricans have attained neither statehood nor independence. Along the way, they have suffered the indignity of a ban—imposed in 1948—on owning a Puerto Rican flag, singing a “patriotic song,” or advocating for independence. Their curious political status, a “United States territory,” which is not a state, but whose residents are given automatic US citizenship, ensures economic and political exploitation by the “mainland.”

During the Great Depression, corporations in the United States attempted to impose wage cuts on impoverished Puerto Rican sugar workers. The journalist John Gunther described what he saw on a visit.

“I saw, in short, misery, disease, squalor, filth. It would be lamentable enough to see this anywhere… to see it on American territory… is a paralyzing jolt to anyone who believes in American standards of progress and civilization.”

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico), under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, organized a general strike that paralyzed the island.

“The period following the sugarcane workers strike was marked by growing clashes between pro-independence groups and colonial troops and police. In 1935, police opened fire on Nationalist Party supporters at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras,” writes Yenica Cortes.

Albizu Campos and other independence fighters were targeted by the United States. In 1937, Campos was sentenced to federal prison in Atlanta for “seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government in Puerto Rico.” In the city of Ponce, the Nationalist Party demonstrated against the incarceration of Campos during a commemoration of the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico by the governing Spanish National Assembly in 1873.

“On March 21st, and for some days before, a significant concentration of police was taking place in Ponce. They were well-armed: rifles, carbines, Thompson sub-machine guns, tear gas bombs, plus the usual police clubs, etc.; a force of 200 men in addition to the routine Ponce police garrison.”

17 civilians were murdered, most shot in the back, and over 200 wounded on the order of Blanton Winship, the US-appointed governor of Puerto Rico. Criticism led to President Franklin Roosevelt removing Governor Winship from the position. Winship was not prosecuted for the massacre, nor were police under his command. He had previously overseen the murder of the revolutionary Augusto César Sandino in Nicaragua.

“People in the United States hardly knew that members of the Nationalist Party were systematically jailed and assassinated in Puerto Rico. Laws were created that gave the colonial police the ‘right’ to gun down members of the Nationalist Party in plain view, without provocation,” writes Carlos “Carlito” Rovira.

In 1950, an armed uprising began in the municipality of Jayuya. It spread throughout Puerto Rico. Fighters of the Nationalist Party engaged in armed confrontations with US-trained police and the National Guard. The nationalists held Jayuya until US military aircraft bombed the city.

Four years later, Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the visitor’s gallery in the House of Representatives . Five representatives were wounded. Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez were arrested and received long prison terms. The attack aimed to draw attention to the Puerto Rican independence movement, but instead led to an intensification of repression.

Conditions on the island worsened after Operation Bootstrap (Operación Manos a la Obra) was put into effect in 1947. The Puerto Rican legislature, under the control of the United States, passed the Industrial Incentives Act eliminating all corporate taxes in order to attract investment. The plan was to gut Puerto Rico’s agrarian system and replace it with industrialization. Operation Bootstrap resulted in massive unemployment and migration to the United States.

The Puerto Rican diaspora significantly influenced American culture, giving rise to movements like the Harlem Renaissance and Nuyorican poetry. However, migrants often encountered discrimination and poverty. For the followers of MAGA, these economic refugees, the victims of US economic policies, and their descendants are “fake American citizens.”

American industrialists, in response to what they perceived as overpopulation, also promoted birth control and non-consensual surgical sterilization (La Operación). In the 1950s and 1960s, the US sterilized over 33% of women on the island. “Specifically, North-American nationalism sought ‘protection for the (white, U.S.) nation from too many of “them”—working-class and dark-skinned people,’” notes LatinX Genocide, quoting author Laura Briggs (Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico).

Puerto Rico was transformed into a tax haven for Wall Street, banks, and transnational corporations in 1976, effectively depriving the country of a tax base for public infrastructure and social services. In 2006, Puerto Rico plunged into a prolonged recession, accumulating over $70 billion in bonded debt and approximately $50 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. In order to address these deficits, the government resorted to borrowing instead of investing in development. This approach led to a combination of increased borrowing, cuts to public services, layoffs, and regressive taxes under successive governments.

By 2014, following the devastation of the 2008–2009 international financial crisis, the small island nation of 3.7 million people faced a $72 billion debt with an annual debt service of $4.5 billion. The debt stood at more than 70% of GDP. Faced with the scarcity of jobs, a large number of desperate Puerto Ricans migrated to the mainland. According to the Census, approximately 75,000 people went to the United States in 2012, with nearly 46,000 being younger than 35 years old. These victims of US imperialism are now considered by MAGA nationalists to be nothing more than “fake Americans.”

PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) was enacted by the US Congress in 2016. It created an unelected Fiscal Oversight and Management Board, derisively called “La Junta.” It wielded power over Puerto Rico’s budgets and fiscal plans. The Board had a primary mission—guaranteeing repayment to creditors through the imposition of austerity: cutting pensions, public payroll, and agency budgets, while promoting privatization and tax breaks for foreign investors.

Additional austerity measures were put into place in 2018 after local legislators refused to alter labor laws as demanded by a federal control board. The previous year, Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, had devastated the country. It resulted in nearly 3,000 fatalities and is considered the costliest hurricane in Puerto Rican history, with damages estimated at $91.6 billion. The hurricane sent another wave of immigrants to the mainland. Approximately 80% of the island’s agricultural output was destroyed. Hurricane Irma had skirted the country only weeks before. COVID-19, social service cuts, and an inadequate federal government response to the hurricanes wracked the country.

In 2022, Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York approved an economic restructuring plan. Under PROMESA, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed her to serve on the US Court for the District of Puerto Rico. Her role is to oversee the Title III debt-restructuring proceedings for the Commonwealth and its associated entities. Critics contend that PROMESA constitutes a colonial or anti-democratic regime, as the Oversight Board possesses the authority to override elected officials and enjoys substantial legal immunities.

According to Jake Paul and Trump conservatives, the decision by the National Football League to showcase Bad Bunny and his Spanish language performance during Super Bowl halftime is a betrayal of traditional American values and the MAGA ethnonationalist doctrine. Paul Aaron writes that analysts identify “MAGA’s core ideologies as white cultural dominance.” Trump endorsed the concept of “reverse migration,” or “remigration,” the latter popularized in the 1960s by the French movement Europe-Action and later as the core concept of the Identitarian “Great Replacement” movement.

In October, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security posted a tweet using the term “remigrate” prior to the national “No Kings” protests, while the Department of State released a “reorganization chart” that included the creation of an “Office of Remigration.”

What hasn’t been previously reported is the extensive 136-page document Congress received that includes the more granular details of what the reimagined department would look like—including an “Office of Remigration,” a far-right, anti-immigrant buzzword made popular in Europe for ridding the country of migrants.

From the moment Donald Trump descended the escalator and entered national politics, his mantra has been that immigrants are violent criminals, drug smugglers, and terrorists. Fox News, Breitbart, and The Daily Caller dutifully amplified Trump’s skewed immigration narrative. MAGA, following Trump’s lead, has demanded mass deportations, family separation, and border militarization. “Immigrants are portrayed as the cause of everything from job loss to crime to cultural erosion. This xenophobia is not based on facts but on a political strategy,” writes historian Matthew A. McIntosh.

This political strategy ignores the elephant in the room—the fact many refugees and asylum seekers are escaping violence and poverty resulting in large part from foreign policy decisions and the imperialistic antecedent of the United States.

As I noted last July (The Role of U.S. Foreign Policy in the ICE Protests. The Plight of Impoverished Latin American Seeking a Better Life), a vast number of Americans are ignorant of the fact US colonialism in Latin America following the Spanish-American War more than a century ago is responsible for the “illegal immigration crisis” in America (and is responsible for an influx of refugees from West Asia, primarily Syria and Afghanistan).

The concept of remigration embraced by MAGA ignores the obvious fact that there would not be an “immigration crisis” if the United States refrained from political and economic intervention in Latin America.

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Kurt Nimmo is a journalist, author, and geopolitical analyst, New Mexico, United States. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s blog.

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