Singer Zara Larsson calls a White House ICE video using her song dehumanising

Zara Larsson is the latest pop singer to find one of her songs attached to a federal immigration video she wants nothing to do with. On Thursday the Swedish singer answered a clip put out by the Trump administration's social media team, which ran footage of ICE agents arresting people under her single Midnight Sun, captioned with a line about deportations that never end.

"I'm just sad. My heart is heavy seeing that," Larsson said in a video reply filmed for TikTok, adding that she wished she could talk to whoever cut it. She spent most of the response arguing that the distance between herself and the people in the footage is luck rather than worth: born in Sweden, given an education, free to travel and work, while the people in the clip are chasing a better life for their families. She said she does not understand how being an undocumented immigrant became the worst thing a person could be.

Her objection to the song choice was sharper than her objection to the politics. "These people in the video are real people," she said, before describing how odd it felt to hear Midnight Sun used that way, given that she wrote it about feeling connected to nature, to the universe and to other people. A song about connection had been turned into a soundtrack for separating families, and she called the result dehumanising in blunt terms.

She is in fairly crowded company. Rolling Stone lists Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande among the artists whose records have been used the same way by the same accounts over the past few years, which is roughly what happens to any song popular enough to be recognised in the first two seconds of a short video. The report does not say whether the White House sought a licence for Midnight Sun, and Larsson did not say in the clip whether she has asked for it to be taken down.

The row lands in a year Larsson has spent arguing about categories rather than politics. She turned down a Best New Artist campaign after thirteen years of releases, and the Recording Academy later confirmed she was not eligible for the 2027 award in any case. Midnight Sun is one of the larger pop singles of her year, which is exactly why it was within reach of anyone making a video.