Nicki Minaj is sharing her own immigrant story in response to the heartbreaking stories of migrant children being torn away from their parents at the U.S. and Mexico border.
“I came to this country as an illegal immigrant at 5 years old,” Minaj wrote on Instagram with a photo of a detention center for migrant children. “I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place and having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5. This is so scary to me. Please stop this. Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now? Not knowing if their parents are dead or alive, if they’ll ever see them again… ”
Minaj, born Onika Tanya Maraj, was born in Trinidad and Tobago before her family moved to Queens, New York when she was a toddler.
The Trump administration has been heavily criticized for its zero-tolerance family separation policy that saw the separation of migrant families that had illegally crossed the border. President Donald Trump has since signed an executive order reversing the practice.
“We are keeping families together,” Trump said. “This will solve that problem. At the same time, we are keeping a very powerful border and it continues to be a zero tolerance. We have zero tolerance for people who enter our country illegally.”
This is not the first time Minaj has spoken out about America’s immigration policies. She expressed her opposition in 2017 to Trump’s executive order barring citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States.
“The most harmful thing you could ever take away from another human being is hope,” she wrote on Twitter.