Bruce Springsteen used his platform at his series of Broadway shows to denounce Donald Trump’s “inhumane” border policy concerning the treatment of thousands of migrant children forcibly separated from their families.

The 68 year old rocker is eight months into a highly successful run of intimate acoustic Broadway shows in New York, and on Tuesday evening (June 19th) he broke from his script to discuss the images from the States’ Mexican border that have been shocking the on-looking world over the last week.

“For 146 shows, I have played pretty much the same set every night. Tonight demands something different,” he told the audience at the Walter Kerr Theatre, according to The Guardian.

Bruce SpringsteenBruce Springsteen has denounced Trump's border policies

He then launched into a rendition of his 1995 protest track ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’, which references the character from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath but mixing it with modern images of poverty and inequality in America.

More: Bruce Springsteen performs at 2018 Tony Awards

The upsetting scenes on television have been the result of the hardline immigration policies of Donald Trump’s Republican administration, as scores of children have been separated from their parents and held in makeshift cages inside detention centres, while the adults have prosecuted for entering America illegally.

Trump administration kingpins Jeff Sessions and Sarah Sanders have both tried justifying the policy on the basis of biblical teachings in recent days, while Nikki Haley announced the United States’ withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council this week, decrying it as biased.

Springsteen’s attack on Trump comes just over a week after Robert de Niro introduced him at Broadway’s Tony Awards last Sunday, with an expletive-laden rant about the president that was bleeped out on live television.

More: Bruce Springsteen releases anti-Donald Trump protest song ‘That’s What Makes Us Great’