Bruce Springsteen broke from the script of his Broadway show on Tuesday night to condemn the “inhumane” treatment of thousands of children who have been separated from their families by the hardline immigration policies of Donald Trump’s administration.
The singer, who is eight months into a New York residency, with a scripted, biographical show mixing career-spanning songs and reflections on his family and life in music, denounced the crackdown at the Mexican border which has seen more than 2,000 children taken from their parents.
Springsteen used his show to condemn “senior people in government” who he said had blasphemed in suggesting that they had a duty to separate families.
After a lengthy, unscripted condemnation, Springsteen, who has in recent presidential elections campaigned for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, told his audience at New York’s Walter Kerr theatre: “For 146 shows, I have played pretty much the same set every night. Tonight demands something different.”
He then played a version of The Ghost of Tom Joad, a protest song he recorded in 1995, inspired by the character from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Instead of Steinbeck’s dust bowl images of 1930s poverty, the Springsteen song draws on modern images of homelessness and inequality, including the lyric: “Wherever somebody’s fighting for a place to stand/Or a decent job or a helping hand/Wherever somebody’s struggling to be free/Look in their eyes, Ma, and you’ll see me.”
Adults have been swept up in a wave of prosecutions for entering the US illegally since April, while children have been held in makeshift cages inside temporary detention centres.
Both Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and White House spokeswoman, Sarah Sanders, have suggested in the past 10 days that biblical teaching compels them to enforce the law.
In recent years Springsteen has been regularly joined on stage by guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine to turn the acoustic song into a howling call to activism. Springsteen’s criticism came nine days after Robert de Niro introduced him at Broadway’s Tony Awards with an expletive-laden attack on Trump, which was bleeped out on US television.