Bruce Springsteen said ICE should leave Minneapolis at New Jersey charity show Saturday
The New Jersey rocker dedicated a performance of his song “The Promised Land” to Renee Good, who was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
At a charity concert Saturday night in Red Bank, N.J., rock legend Bruce Springsteen said ICE needs to get out of Minneapolis — only he didn’t say it quite that nicely.
Well into his set, Springsteen introduced the song “The Promised Land,” from his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town, which he said he wrote “as an ode to American possibility.” Springsteen said American values and ideals of the past 250 years are being tested like never before.
“Those values, those ideals, have never been as endangered as they are right now,” Springsteen, 76, told the crowd at the Count Basie Center for the Arts in a video posted by NJ.com.
“If you believe in the power of the law and that no one stands above it,” Springsteen continued, “if you stand against heavily armed, masked federal troops invading an American city, using gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens, if you believe you don’t deserve to be murdered for exercising your American right to protest, then send a message to this president, and as the mayor of that city has said, ‘ICE should get the f— out of Minneapolis.”
To a cheering crowed, Springsteen dedicated the song to the memory of Renee Good, calling her “a mother of three, and American citizen.” Good, 37, was killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis — a moment, widely seen on video, that has inflamed tensions over the Trump administration’s use of the federal agency.
Springsteen was not on the official performers’ list for the “Bob’s Birthday Bash” concert, which raises money for research to help people living with Parkinson’s, ALS, and other diseases. But he’s been a frequent “surprise” guest at the annual event, as New Jersey music reporter Bobby Olivier noted.
Springsteen has long found himself involved in political discourse, including in 1984 when he called out Republican President Ronald Reagan for misunderstanding the point of his hit song, “Born in the U.S.A.” while on the campaign trail.
Kicking off his 2025 European tour in Manchester, England, he called the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous.”
That time around, President Donald Trump responded in kind.
“I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.