Skip to content
News

Bruce Springsteen Breaks From Broadway Script to Go After Trump on Detained Children

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 10: Bruce Springsteen performs onstage during the 72nd Annual Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall on June 10, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)

Bruce Springsteen‘s Broadway residency is more of a one-man show than a rock concert: He’s been playing the same setlist every night for the last eight months, interspersed with bits of scripted monologue adapted from his memoir. At last night’s performance, he broke from the Springsteen on Broadway script for the first to speak about the “inhumane” treatment of children who are being separated from their parents and kept in cages at the southern U.S. border.

According to the Guardian, Springsteen gave a “lengthy, unscripted condemnation” of “senior people in government” who are enabling the detainments. “For 146 shows, I have played pretty much the same set every night. Tonight demands something different,” he said, before playing “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” a 1995 protest song that is not part of the Springsteen on Broadway setlist.

Thousands of children have been detained and separated from their families since April, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new policy to refer every person caught crossing the border illegally for federal criminal prosecution.

Hear “The Ghost of Tom Joad” below.