President Donald Trump has proposed making Canada the 51st state, a title many Puerto Ricans hoped to gain for their territory. But Trump’s Canada push hasn’t disheartened the advocates leading the charge for Puerto Rican statehood.
Instead, the president’s expansionist mindset is giving them renewed hope — and new material to craft a tailor-made pitch to Trump in favor of statehood.
“This president, since his swearing-in, has been very vocal about expanding the territorial area of the United States for national security and economic reasons,” José Fuentes-Agostini, the chairman of the Puerto Rico Statehood Council, told NOTUS. “We are thrilled with his position because we feel that the primary reason to make Puerto Rico a state is precisely for national security reasons and economic development reasons.”
“If the president decides that he’s going to push to join to the union two or three states, well, fine. We want to be one of them,” Fuentes-Agostini said. “We don’t have to be 51, we can be 52 or 53, as long as we get in.”
Fuentes-Agostini, who served as Puerto Rico’s attorney general and aided Trump’s 2016 campaign, said the federal infrastructure was already in place for the U.S. to grant it statehood, a move he argued would help Trump stave off Chinese influence in the region.
George Laws García, the statehood council’s executive director, similarly argued Puerto Rico could fit right into what he called Trump’s “strategic focus” on “building out America’s influence.”
“He’s looking at places like Greenland, like Canada and like the Panama Canal as places of absolutely critical geostrategic interest to the United States,” Laws García said. “There is a great opportunity for Puerto Rico within this context to essentially showcase the immense value that we bring to the United States.”
Republicans in Congress have, literally and figuratively, laughed off the president on his desire to “absorb” Canada. Sen. Ted Cruz told NOTUS Trump was “mostly trolling [Justin] Trudeau,” although the outgoing prime minister has suggested it’s more serious.
Puerto Rican statehood advocates were quick to point out that, unlike Canada, its residents are already American citizens who have voted in favor of statehood time and again — most recently by a margin of nearly 60% in November.
“Even though we are natural-born United States citizens, and we’re subject to U.S. federal laws and to the jurisdiction of the federal executive and the federal judiciary, we do not have full participation in the U.S. Congress,” Laws García said.
Puerto Rico earned few mentions in Trump’s 2024 campaign, save for comedian Tony Hinchcliffe calling it a “floating island of garbage” at one of Trump’s rallies. Last year, the official RNC platform made no mention of Puerto Rican self-determination in a shift from the party’s 2016 and 2020 platforms.
The White House did not respond when asked if Trump would support statehood for Puerto Rico.
Republicans in Congress have long opposed Puerto Rican statehood, arguing the territory would almost certainly elect and send Democrats to represent them in Congress. In 2022, 191 House Republicans voted against a bill establishing a referendum for Puerto Ricans that would allow them to voice their preference between independence from the U.S., statehood or U.S. association. Every House Democrat supported the bill.
Sen. Mitch McConnell infamously decried calls to grant Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico statehood as “full-bore socialism” in a 2019 Fox News interview. Fuentes-Agostini cited McConnell’s opposition as one of the major roadblocks to the movement.
“There’s this dumb, stupid argument by Mitch McConnell that Puerto Rico is going to bring two Democrat senators to Congress, and we have proven to him once and again that he’s wrong,” Fuentes-Agostini said. “He stopped using the talking point, but he caused some damage to the movement.”
“But the reality is that it doesn’t make any difference. We shouldn’t be deciding admission of states based on their political inclination,” he continued. “We should be doing it based on merit, and Puerto Rico has earned its place in the United States.”
Fuentes-Agostini pointed to Puerto Rico’s newly sworn-in Republican governor as evidence the territory’s residents could send GOP lawmakers to Congress.
Laws García also hit back on the assumption that Puerto Rico would only elect Democrats.
“It’s assumed that if it becomes a state, it’ll automatically elect two Democrats to the Senate and four Democrats to the House — not necessarily true,” Laws García said. “Puerto Ricans are swing voters that are gettable both by the Democratic and the Republican Party.”
Now they just need to convince lawmakers to agree. Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution leaves Congress the power to add states to the union, and in effect, it need only pass a law in order to make territories like Puerto Rico a state.
“We urge all Republican leaders to join this effort for equality and Statehood for Puerto Rico,” the Puerto Rico Young Republican Federation said in a statement posted to social media Sunday. “It is time to include American citizens residing in Puerto Rico in President Donald Trump’s ‘Golden Age.’”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.