The Department of Homeland Security tried to dunk on Cardi B after she joked about protecting fans from ICE at her concert. It did not go well for them.
The whole thing started Wednesday night at the first stop of Cardi’s “Little Miss Drama” tour in Palm Desert, California. During a rendition of the Mexican folk song “La Cucaracha,” she asked if there were any Guatemalans or Mexicans in the crowd. When cheers erupted, she made a promise.
“Bitch, if ICE comes in here, we gon’ jump they asses,” the rapper said. “I’ve got some bear mace in the back! They ain’t taking my fans, bitch. Let’s go.”
Cardi has been an unrelenting critic of Trump’s deportation machine, which apparently made her too tempting a target for the administration to ignore. DHS issued a statement to TMZ that the department then amplified on X: “As long as she doesn’t drug and rob our agents, we’ll consider that an improvement over her past behavior.”
The jab referenced Cardi’s past confessions about robbing and drugging men during her years as a stripper—something she publicly apologized for in 2019, calling it one of her “limited options” for survival at the time.
But if DHS thought they’d landed a knockout blow, they miscalculated badly. Cardi fired back Thursday with a question the White House has been dodging for weeks.
“If we talking about drugs let’s talk about Epstein and friends drugging underage girls to rape them,” she wrote on X. “Why yall don’t wanna talk about the Epstein files?”
It’s a fair question. Trump ran on releasing the Epstein files, and while some documents have been made public, the administration has been notably uninterested in pursuing the powerful men whose names keep appearing in them. Trump himself was photographed with Epstein multiple times and once praised the convicted sex trafficker as a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
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? https://t.co/U7yCarPIXs
— Cardi B (@iamcardib) February 12, 2026
So a federal agency decided to beef with a rapper on social media about her past mistakes—and got reminded that their boss has his own uncomfortable history with a pedophile.