Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally was meant to be a triumphant return to the city that made his name. Instead, the event has reheated simmering tensions on the island territory of Puerto Rico, where locals say they feel like second-class citizens, days out from a historic US election.
Comments from a comedian at Trump’s rally this week, describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, might have fired up local resentment against the Republican candidate, but those who live there will be unable to show their anger through the ballot box.
Residents of Puerto Rico are among the more than 3 million Americans whose votes won’t count, when the country elects its president next week.
Most residents of the US territories – Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas – are citizens and pay federal taxes. Many have family on the mainland.
But the territories have no votes in the electoral college that ultimately decides the president.
“They’re just basically captive to whatever Congress and the president want to do to them,” says Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, a law professor at Indiana University. “To be a citizen means to be a member of the political community. Not in the US.”
It’s one of the few things uniting the disparate territories, which range from Puerto Rico, home to 3 million citizens in the Caribbean, to American Samoa, closer to Australia than America with a population of just 50,000.