Days after the NFL announced superstar Bad Bunny will headline the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, senior Trump administration officials are threatening to send immigration agents to the popular sporting event.
Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican Grammy-winning rapper and singer whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, has said he’s avoided touring in the U.S. out of concern that his fans could be targeted by the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts.
“There was the issue of — like, f—–g ICE could be outside [my concert]. And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about,” the artist told i-D magazine in September.
Corey Lewandowski, chief adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, responded to Bad Bunny’s comments Wednesday on right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson’s “The Benny Show,” saying, “There is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people in this country illegally. Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else. We will find you. We will apprehend you. We will put you in a detention facility, and we will deport you. So know that that is a very real situation under this administration, which is completely contrary to what how it used to be.”
The NFL did not immediately responded to MSNBC’s request for comment.
Lewandowski served as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign manager in 2016 but was fired shortly before Trump secured the Republican nomination. He was later fired in 2021 from a position overseeing a Trump-aligned super PAC after a donor alleged he sexually harassed her at a Las Vegas charity event (an attorney for Lewandowski told NBC News at the time that he would “not dignify [accusations] with a further response”).
Trump appointed Lewandowski to the Homeland Security Advisory Council in June.
