Cardi B’s opening night on her Little Miss Drama Tour quickly turned political when the rapper delivered a profane warning about federal immigration agents during her performance in Southern California.
The 33-year-old artist launched the tour on Wednesday at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert.
According to the New York Post, midway through the show, she briefly sang “La Cucaracha,” then paused to ask how many people in the crowd were Mexican or Guatemalan.
Moments later, she addressed Immigration and Customs Enforcement directly, telling the audience, “B—h, if ICE come in here, we gon’ jump they a–es.”
She added, “B—h, I got some bear mace in the back,” as the crowd reacted, before declaring, “They ain’t taking my fans, b—h.”
The performance continued with her hit “I Like It,” but the remarks drew a swift response from the Department of Homeland Security.
The agency’s official X account quote-retweeted a post about the comments, writing, “As long as she doesn’t drug and rob our agents, we’ll consider that an improvement over her past behavior.”
The statement referenced an Instagram Live video from 2016 in which Cardi B said she had drugged and robbed men while working as a stripper.
“N**s must’ve forgot, my n*a, the shit that I did to muthaf—in’ survive. I had to go strip. I had to go, ‘Oh yeah, you wanna f–k me? Yeah yeah yeah, let’s go back to this hotel,’” she said in the video.
“And I drugged n****s up and I robbed them. That’s what I used to do. Nothing was muthaf—in’ handed to me, my n—a. Nothing!”
When those remarks resurfaced in 2019, she addressed the backlash on social media, saying they were “things that I felt I needed to do to make a living.”
“I never claim to be perfect or come from a perfect world wit a perfect past, I speak my truth, I always speak my own s–t,” she wrote.
She added that the hip-hop culture she comes from is “where you can talk about about where you come from, talk about the wrong things you had to do to get where you are.”
“I made the choices that I did at the time because I had very limited options. I was blessed to have been able to rise from that, but so many women have not. Whether or not they were poor choice at the time, I did what I had to do to survive,” she added.
She concluded, “I have a past that I can’t change, we all do.”
The onstage comments and the federal agency’s response quickly circulated online as the tour’s first night came to a close.
