The White House has spent months pairing immigration enforcement footage with chart hits, and the artists behind those hits keep objecting. Zara Larsson is the latest after her 2025 single Midnight Sun soundtracked a TikTok video of ICE agents handcuffing and deporting people. The post was captioned “Never ending deportations,” a play on the song’s own lyric.

Larsson answered with a three-minute video on her own TikTok account, opening by holding an “L” up to her forehead. She called the post dehumanizing and said the people in the footage were simply dealt a different hand in life. She ended by calling whoever made it “f***ing losers.”

The artist has said Midnight Sun was written about her home and about Swedish summer nights. However, the White House turned it into a soundtrack for deportation raids, and Larsson said the clip only drives a wedge between people. Her response has since passed 5 million views.

Larsson also spoke about her own upbringing, saying she considers herself lucky to have had access to education and opportunities growing up in Sweden. She argued that the people in the footage are chasing the same kind of future, and that the vast majority of undocumented people are ordinary workers with families. The way the raids have been turned into memes is what unsettled her most.

Earlier this year, the White House posted a video of President Donald Trump dancing to Larsson’s 2015 hit Lush Life, with on-screen text backing ICE and law enforcement. Larsson answered that time with an Instagram Story saying she loved immigrants and hated ICE. The latest objection is no surprise, as she had already made her position public.

Ariana Grande flooded the comments of a White House post in June after her song Bye ran under ICE arrest footage, telling the administration never to attach her music to something she called barbaric and inhumane. Her team had the audio pulled soon after. Sabrina Carpenter made a similar complaint when Juno was used over raid footage.

Semisonic said it never authorized the use of Closing Time in a deportation clip, arguing that the song is about hope and possibility. Noah Kahan commented under an Instagram post that set American Cars to images of a presidential factory visit, saying he would never approve of his music backing the administration.

The White House has also reached for Bad Bunny’s La Mudanza and Drake’s Hoe Phase, both of which drew backlash as the two artists have criticized the immigration crackdown. Bad Bunny never commented publicly, but his track was later pulled from the post. Musicians keep getting dragged into political fights, and several acts recently quit Ed Sheeran’s tour over a dropped collaborator.

Larsson holds more leverage than most performers here, as she bought back her recording catalog in 2022 and now houses it at her own label, Sommer House. That ownership gives her a stronger say over how the music is licensed, though the deals platforms strike with rights holders still complicate any takedown.

Midnight Sun has already been stripped from the White House post while the footage stays live on its TikTok account, and the administration has yet to respond to Larsson directly.

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