Popular Swedish pop artist Zara Larsson has become the latest high-profile musician to publicly rebuke the Trump White House for the unauthorized use of her work in political social media content, calling out the administration for pairing her track *Midnight Sun* with footage of immigration enforcement raids in what she describes as a dehumanizing and divisive messaging push.
The short-form video posted to the White House’s TikTok account spliced together raw footage of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and other law enforcement officers detaining undocumented individuals, showing suspects being handcuffed and loaded into transport vehicles. The White House cleverly reworked a lyric from Larsson’s track to caption the clip: “never ending deportations,” a direct play on the song’s original line “never-ending midnight sun.” Though the White House has since removed Larsson’s audio from the post, the video itself remains visible on the administration’s official TikTok feed.
Larsson responded quickly to the unauthorized use, posting a three-minute reaction video to her own social media channels that had amassed more than 4.2 million views as of recent counts. In the clip, she shared a clip of the original White House post before cutting to a selfie-style response where she held an L-shaped hand gesture against her forehead in a clear sign of criticism.
“That is so dehumanizing,” Larsson told her followers in the video. “These people in this video — they’re real people. The vast majority of these people who are undocumented are regular people with jobs and they’re just trying to have a better future. It’s so crazy how everything is so memefied and so ‘ha-ha-ha,’” she added. The artist also noted that her original lyrics for *Midnight Sun* were written to celebrate the connection between people and the natural world, making the White House’s repurposing of the track to promote hardline immigration policies even more inappropriate. She accused the administration of using her work to deepen political division in the country.
This is not the first time Larsson has clashed with the Trump administration over unauthorized use of her music. Earlier in 2026, she publicly condemned a campaign video featuring Donald Trump dancing that was set to her hit track *Lush Life*. Larsson is far from alone in pushing back against the White House’s social media practices: a growing number of top music artists have demanded the administration remove their work from political content, with multiple high-profile incidents forcing the White House to take down audio from past posts.
Earlier this year, Taylor Swift’s *August* was removed from a Trump administration reel after the artist’s team intervened, while Olivia Rodrigo had one of her tracks pulled from a White House video after she publicly condemned its use for what she called “hateful propaganda.” Singers Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter have also issued separate public warnings demanding the Trump administration stop using their music in political social media content.
The BBC has reached out to the White House to request comment on Larsson’s accusations, with no official response issued as of yet.