The Trump White House set migrant handcuffs to an Ariana Grande song.
The video, posted to TikTok on Monday, shows border agents pinning wrists, marching bodies into cars, and loading them into detention centers. The soundtrack is Grande’s 2024 hit “Bye.” The caption reads: “Bye-bye… President Trump has delivered the most secure border in history.”
This is an act of cultural cannibalism. You are taking a song about ending a romance and turning it into a victory chant for state violence. You are selling the sight of human beings in restraint as entertainment.
Grande answered plainly. “Please do not use my music in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense,” she wrote on the post. The administration’s response was to mute the video, remove her comment, and redirect the cruelty onto the people in the handcuffs. “What’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson told reporters, “are the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens.”
You invert the moral order. Isaiah warned against those who call evil good and put darkness for light, and you are doing exactly that — staging a cruelty and calling it justice, then pointing at the people you are crushing and calling them the barbarians. The prophets of Israel heard this same move from the kings of Judah, who claimed they were simply enforcing the law. Jesus heard it from the Pharisees, who claimed they were protecting the purity of the people. The technique does not change. Identify a subgroup, attribute the worst acts of its worst members to the whole, and use that attribution to license whatever the state wants to do next.
You are not new to this. A growing catalog of artists has told you to stop. Sabrina Carpenter did it. ABBA did it. Céline Dion and Beyoncé did it. Grande joins a list that is itself a kind of cultural indictment. As the boos and artist pullouts mount, you do not change the machinery. You only strip the soundtrack away and keep the handcuffs on. You signed a law appropriating more than seventy billion dollars to keep the gears turning, and you need the music to soften the sound of the gears — as if a pop melody could wash away the blood on the walls Ezekiel warned about. It cannot.
There is a long tradition of using music to celebrate state violence. Authoritarian regimes favor marches. Democracies prefer something with a beat you can dance to. Making deportation a music video is not a mistake. It is a method. The video is designed to make you feel satisfaction — the satisfaction of seeing the law enforced, yes, but also the satisfaction of seeing the people you have been taught to fear in handcuffs, with a pop hit telling you that everything is fine. This is the official aesthetic of the deportation machine, the same machine the historian Adam Goodman documented in his 2020 book, a machine that has expelled nearly 57 million people over the past century, most of them not by formal order but through what he calls “voluntary departure” — a term that should always appear in scare quotes, because when the alternative is starvation or indefinite detention, the departure is not voluntary.
What is being flattened here is the substance of what an immigration raid actually is. It is parents being taken from children. It is workers who have been in this country for decades, who pay taxes, who have U.S. citizen children, being loaded into vans. The video shows none of the human cost. It shows only the clean, satisfying moment of removal. The song tells you what to feel.
I will name the thing plainly. You are breaking what God knit together — mother to child, father to daughter — and calling it enforcement. You are treating families as raw material for a political rally. You are cultivating the hard heart Pharaoh wore before the plagues, a posture that processes human suffering without letting it pierce the conscience. When you set a cheerful chorus to the image of a father being separated from his daughter, you are asking the country not to weep. You are asking them to dance instead.
I scroll past the footage too, and that makes me culpable in your work. The algorithm feeds us the clip, and I tap the screen for the next distraction, treating the border as a reality show rather than a moral crisis. I have allowed the debate to harden my own conscience while you load people into vans. This hardness of heart belongs to fallen humanity, but you are the ones who wield it as policy now — the ancient temptation to process human suffering as administrative routine, and you have surrendered to it.
The families being separated, the workers being loaded into vans, the children who will grow up without a parent — they are not a music video. They are the stranger the Torah commands you to love because your own ancestors knew what it was to be strangers in the land of Egypt. They are the least of these whom Christ names as His own presence in the world. When the Son of Man separates the sheep from the goats, He will not ask what department you worked for. He will ask whether you visited the prisoner and welcomed the stranger. The judgment falls on your hands, not your rank.
There is no TikTok caption that can make deportation something other than what it is: the use of state power to break human lives. The door of return is open to you who administer this — the officer who pins the wrists, the official who signs the budget, the staffer who edits the reel. All of you are being hardened into tools that cannot feel. You can stop. You can choose to see the person in the handcuffs as a neighbor. You can delete the clip, mute the song, and look at what you are actually doing.
The first step is to turn off the music.