During Cardi B‘s Little Miss Drama Tour launch in Palm Desert, California, on Wednesday, the Grammy-winner paused the show to speak to the crowd in a now-viral moment. “If ICE come in here, we’re gonna jump they asses,” she said on stage. “I got some bear mace in the back. They ain’t taking my fans, bitch. Let’s go!” she added, before performing her next song, “I Like It.”
Her remarks caught the attention of Donald Trump‘s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the following day, which reposted a TMZ story about it and wrote on X, “As long as she doesn’t drug and rob our agents, we’ll consider that an improvement over her past behavior.” The DHS post appeared to reference a video that resurfaced in 2019 of Cardi saying she drugged and robbed men while she worked as a stripper before becoming famous.
In response to the DHS, Cardi fired back, “If we talking about drugs let’s talk about Epstein and friends drugging underage girls to rape them. Why yall don’t wanna talk about the Epstein files?” The artist directed the department to the controversy over the latest tranche of files released by the Justice Department from the criminal investigations of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
While President Trump has urged America to move past the Epstein scandal — telling reporters last week that “it’s really time for the country to get on to something else” and claiming he’s been exonerated of any wrongdoing — lawmakers and the public remain shocked and disturbed after viewing unredacted versions of the government’s files on the disgraced financier.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration and DHS has received fierce backlash from communities across the county following federal immigration raids. On Thursday, White House border czar Tom Homan announced that the Trump administration will end the immigration enforcement surge it launched in Minnesota that led to widespread protests and chaos in the Twin Cities for weeks. The news comes weeks after federal authorities fatally two U.S. citizens: Renee Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three on her way home from school drop-off, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse in the intensive care unit of a local V.A. hospital.
Speaking to reporters after Homan’s announcement, Gov. Tim Walz issued a sober message. “This surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota — and I guess they’ll go wherever they’re going to go — but the fact of the matter is, they left us with deep damage, generational trauma,” Walz said. “They left us with economic ruin. In some cases, they left us with many unanswered questions: Where are our children? Where, and what is the process of the investigations into those that were responsible for the deaths of Renee [Good] and Alex [Pretti]?”
