Cardi B is pushing back after a public exchange with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on X, formerly known as Twitter, over her comments about immigration enforcement.

The Grammy-winning rapper sparked controversy while launching her “Little Miss Drama” tour on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, located in Coachella Valley. During her remarks to the crowd, Cardi B suggested that concertgoers would confront agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if they attempted to attend her shows.

Video shared on social media shows the artist telling fans, “I got some bear mace in the back. It’s like the mafia in this,” in reference to potential ICE presence.
The Department of Homeland Security responded Thursday, Feb. 12, in a post on X, referencing Cardi B’s widely circulated 2019 Instagram Live video in which she admitted to previously drugging and robbing men while working as a stripper.

“As long as she doesn’t drug and rob our agents, we’ll consider that an improvement over her past behavior,” the agency wrote.

Cardi B fired back on X, shifting the focus to the Justice Department’s ongoing release of investigative files related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. “If we talking about drugs, let’s talk about Epstein and friends drugging underage girls to r@pe them. Why y’all don’t wanna talk about the Epstein files?” she wrote.

The exchange comes amid heightened attention surrounding the Justice Department’s document disclosures. According to a Feb. 1 review by The New York Times, references to Donald Trump, his Florida property Mar-a-Lago, and other mentions of the president appear approximately 38,000 times across 5,300 files released Jan. 30 by the U.S. Department of Justice, though the publication noted that several of the documents appear to be duplicates.

The online back-and-forth underscores ongoing tensions between public figures and federal agencies as immigration enforcement and high-profile investigations remain flashpoints in national discourse.