NFL Ordered Jennifer Lopez to Cut Her “Kids in Cages” Halftime Moment The Night Before Super Bowl LIV

The National Football League ordered that Jennifer Lopez remove the “kids in cages” imagery from her 2020 Super Bowl LIV halftime show the night before the game, according to the new JLo Netflix movie Halftime.

The documentary, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday night and will release on Netflix on June 14, follows Lopez as she prepares for her Super Bowl halftime performance. Though she only has about six minutes of stage time, thanks to the fact that she is co-headlining with Shakira, she wants to make it count—including a powerful statement aimed at then-president Trump’s expanding immigration detention centers. Struck by the images of children in cages at detention centers, Lopez, who was born and raised in the Bronx by Puerto Rican parents, was moved to use her platform to send a message to her fellow Latino-Americans. “I’m not into politics, I’m not that person, but I felt like I was living in a United States I didn’t recognize,” she says in the film. “I was afraid for my children.”

In the face of that fear, Lopez wanted to send a positive message to Latino children across the nation: They can’t be kept in cages. The idea for the show: Her own daughter, Emme Maribel Muñiz, would sing Lopez’s hit “Let’s Get Loud” while in a cage on stage, before breaking out, and there would be 18 cages with children featured out on the field. We see Lopez struggle and negotiate with various higher-ups about the plan, but eventually, the plan is set—or so she thinks. Until, the night before the Super Bowl, Lopez and her team got the word that the NFL wanted to cut the cages from the show completely. The order came from “the highest authority in the NFL,” according to Lopez’s longtime manager Benny Medina, implying that it came from the Commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell. (Goodell also famously clashed with player Colin Kaepernick in 2016, when Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and systemic racism—as the documentary reminds viewers.)

Lopez tells her manager to do whatever it takes to keep the cages in the show. “To me, this is not about politics, it’s about human rights,” she says in the film. The documentary doesn’t explain how he did it, or what negotiations or concessions were made, but the cages stay in the show, albeit very briefly, and not very often shown by the cameras. But the cages were featured enough that sharp-eyed viewers took notice, and saw it for the message that it was—especially when Lopez punctuated the moment by holding up a Puerto Rican flag and screaming “Latinos!” to the crowd.

Later, she discussed the moment in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying, “The whole idea of having my daughter come up in a cage and sing ‘Let’s Get Loud,’ — the whole idea was to raise our voices, to understand that your voice matters and to always use your voice. And that’s why I filled the stage with little girls.” She added, “It was really important to take the risk. And even if I got crap for it afterward, which I hope I didn’t, I hope that it was received in the way that you did.”

Now, with the new information from the Halftime documentary, we know just how hard Lopez fought for that particular risk. Even Roger Goodell can’t keep JLo from getting loud.