Bruce Springsteen just put out a new song called “Streets of Minneapolis” that both memorializes the protesters killed by ICE in that city and lambastes the Trump administration’s “lies.”
“Two dead left to die on snow-filled streets / Alex Pretti and Renee Good,” he sings.
He also calls out “King Trump” in the brutal lyrics, slamming his “private army from the DHS” and evoking the below-freezing temperatures in the city to describe the dread he sings about: “Through the winter’s ice and cold / Down Nicollet Avenue / A city aflame fought fire and ice / ‘Neath an occupier’s boots.”
Springsteen goes on, “Guns belted to their coats / Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law / Or so their story goes,” calling out the Trump administration’s accounts of the shooting deaths of suburban mom Good and VA nurse Pretti, in the face of contradictory and widely-circulated video of both incidents.
Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, his Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and more officials have tried to paint the deceased as “domestic terrorists” who intended to “harm” officers. Springsteen, like many who have spoken out about ICE’s activity in Minneapolis, is not buying their stories.
He names them both with the lyric, “Miller and Noem’s dirty lies.”
The track echoes his 2001 song “American Skin (41 Shots),” which he wrote to protest the NYPD shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student who was shot while reaching for his wallet to show his identity.
The song comes after Springsteen spent a large part of his “Land of Hope and Dreams Tour,” which ended last year, calling Trump an “authoritarian” and “fascist.”
Trump responded with a string of insults (including an AI video of himself hitting the rocker with a golf ball) as well as threats of a “major investigation” into Springsteen’s support of Kamala Harris. Springsteen never stopped calling Trump “corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous,” however, and last May, he released an EP that cemented his tour’s anti-Trump speeches into the music industry record.
And he’s not done using his platform to call attention to Trump’s actions. He sings in detail about Pretti’s death on the new track, “Trump’s federal thugs beat up on / His face and his chest / Then we heard the gunshots.”
“Alex Pretti lay in the snow, dead,” he sings, “Their claim was self-defense, sir / Just don’t believe your eyes.”
Springsteen finishes the track by singing of “glass and bloody tears,” calling attention to the targeting of “friends” whose “skin is black or brown,” and then declares, “ICE out now.”
