Bad Bunny’s show, Puerto Rico global music star and an outspoken critic of Trump’s immigration policies, is expected to highlight on one of the world’s biggest stages the political and cultural divide in the administration’s outburst that led to the killing of two Americans in Minneapolis and prompted protests across the country.

Trump’s border and immigration policies have been popular with voters for most of the past year. But after weeks of seeing masked federal agents confronting people in the streets, detaining children and killing a pairs of US citizensOnly 34% of voters approve of how officials are implementing the policy, down six points from two weeks earlier, according to a Feb. 4 Quinnipiac poll.

Republicans, on the other hand, negotiated with Democrats on a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security. They have less than a week to make a deal or risk shutting down the department at the center of the immigration explosion.

Many Republicans, many of whom are in lock-step with the administration, say the immigration attacks are going too far.

“We should be targeting criminals and gang members, not grandmothers. That’s a mistake,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Florida Republican and former mayor of Miami-Dade county, said this week in Fox news

Even after announcing the withdrawal of 700 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from Minnesota and an earlier drawdown in Maine, Trump’s hardline approach threatens to alienate Latino voters before the midterms, sidelining a critical voter bloc that helped get him elected.

The results were shown last week when a strong Republican Texas state senate seat turned blue: the 31-point swing to Democrats was driven by the district’s Latino electorate. That follows a string of election victories late last year where Democrats exceeded expectations, from the Virginia governor’s race to Miami mayoral vote.

Read more: Texas Democrat’s Shock Win Run by Latinos, 31-Point Flip

“A change of this magnitude is not something that can be ruled out,” Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis said in a social media post. post on February 1, citing the Texas results. “Republicans should be clear-eyed about the political environment heading into the midterms.”

Republican strategist Mike Madrid, who specializes in Latino voters, said the president’s immigration and economic policies have alienated key voting blocs from him. He emphasized that the Republican’s loss in Texas was unusual given how Trump performed in 2024.

“I’ve never seen that in three and a half decades of work,” Madrid said. “The two forces that he had to build a multiracial coalition not only collapsed, but they were actually cemented against him.”

Although half of Latinos support Trump in 2024, a new Poll by the Pew Research Center shows that 70% now disapprove of him, including 61% who say his policies have made the economy worse. When the survey was conducted before the latest protests erupted, about two-thirds said they disapproved of Trump’s approach to immigration, with more than half of Latinos saying arrests or assaults had occurred in their community since the president took office.

“In the past, it’s always been the economics of immigration as an issue,” said Mark Lopez, Pew’s director of race and ethnicity research. But now, “a growing share of Latinos say they worry about deportations of someone they know or even themselves.”

“And so all those things point to increased immigration as an issue,” he added.

After Trump took office, the mostly Spanish-speaking Bad Bunny said he would avoid the mainland US on his next world tour, saying he didn’t want to put his fans at risk of being caught by ICE at his shows.

“ICE out,” the artist, whose name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, said at the Grammy Awards on February 1. “We are not savages, we are not animals, we are not aliens. We are human beings and we are Americans.”

Alternate Show

Trump will not tune in to watch the halftime show, the White House said, but more than 100 million others will.

In protest of Bad Bunny’s starring role in the Super Bowl, critics organized an alternative “All-American Halftime Show” headlined by Trump supporter Kid Rock and backed by the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA group.

In addition to withdrawing hundreds of ICE agents, the White House has taken other steps to defuse tensions in Minneapolis. Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, was sent to replace Greg Bovino, the controversial on-the-ground commander who critics say fueled the conflict. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also said that all officers in Minneapolis will now wear body cameras.

Trump said in an interview this week on NBC that he was “not happy with what happened” in Minnesota, adding that “maybe we could use a little a softer touchbut you still have to be tough.”

The president also sought to reassure Americans who feel his economic policies have neglected them, laying out an affordable agenda and saying he aims to help achieve things like home ownership. Currently, most of the initial suggestions fell flat.

“I don’t think it matters how Republicans want to change the narrative of affordability,” said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, who specializes in Latino voters. “All the people in the community see is the terror on our streets.”

Although the midterm elections are still nine months away, many Republicans worry that the damage has already been done.

“Hispanics are leaving the GOP in huge numbers, and pretending it’s not going to fix it,” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a South Florida Republican, said in a social media post on Jan. 27. “As Republicans, we need to reverse course and act now.”