(AFP) – The wildly popular Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny says he will skip the United States during an upcoming world tour because he fears raids by immigration agents at his concerts. Since July, the singer has been playing to sold-out shows in San Juan, capital of the US territory in the Caribbean.
He will kick off his “Debi Tirar Mas Fotos” (I Should Have Taken More Photos) international tour, which will take him to Latin America, Australia, Japan, and Europe, starting in November. The artist said he will not perform shows in the United States, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have arrested tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, many of them Latinos, under a crackdown ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“There were many reasons why I didn’t show up in the US, and none of them were out of hate. I’ve performed there many times,” he told the British magazine i-D in an interview published Wednesday. Bad Bunny said his shows this summer in Puerto Rico have been very successful and he enjoyed meeting Latinos who have lived in the continental United States.
He said the problem is “ICE could be outside” US concert venues, using an expletive to describe the agency. “And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.” In June, Bad Bunny posted video footage on his social media channels from an ICE raid that took place on his home island.
Since Trump took office in January for a second term, the number of undocumented immigrants detained in police raids has reached record highs. In June, there were 60,254 such arrests in the United States, a record for that month, compared with 40,500 arrests in January 2025 before Trump returned to the White House, according to an AFP analysis of government data.
In Puerto Rico, where ICE also operates, 500 immigrants, mainly from the nearby Dominican Republic, were arrested in the first four months of Trump’s second term, an ICE official, Rebecca Gonzalez-Ramos, said in an interview on National Public Radio.
© 2024 AFP
