The White House Hijacks Ariana Grande’s ‘Bye’ to Sell Deportation — Then Deletes Her Objection

The White House posted a TikTok on Monday. Over footage of immigration officers placing people in handcuffs and herding them into detention, someone laid Ariana Grande’s 2024 hit “Bye,” and someone captioned it “Bye-bye… President Trump has delivered the most secure border in history.” Grande commented on the post, asking that her voice not be used in relation to what she called “barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense.” The administration deleted her comment, muted the clip, and kept the video up. Spokesperson Abigail Jackson then told the media that what’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous are “the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens.”

The maneuver is a textbook red herring. Grande did not object to border enforcement against violent offenders; she refused to have her work conscripted into a government-produced deportation reel that treats the handcuffing of strangers as a music-video beat. The spokesperson changed the subject from the artist who said do not use me to a separate category of person the state finds convenient, stripped of names and case numbers and due process, converted into a rhetorical cudgel wielded against a pop star on social media. The administration has been refining this exact dance for months: take ordinary cultural artifacts, strip them of context, and repurpose them as props for an enforcement regime that demands applause for its own hardness of heart as we have documented across the administration’s digital footprint.

What was produced Monday was not enforcement of immigration law. It was enforcement as entertainment. The White House commissioned, captioned, and broadcast a deportation-chic promotional clip, scored to a pop anthem, targeting an audience young enough to vote and young enough to love Grande. The reel was not a policy argument about border security; it was the public performance of state power held over the bodies of the restrained, set to a beat. Grande called it barbaric. She is right. And the biblical tradition that sits at the base of this country’s moral culture has quite a lot to say about the public performance of state power over the bodies of strangers.

Let me show you what the text actually says, because the apparatus that put handcuffs over that beat has spent decades inverting it. Deuteronomy 10:18–19: “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” The same chapter, the same breath, as the widow and the orphan. The foreigner is not a secondary concern lodged in a later footnote; the foreigner is listed as a direct object of the divine love the law commands the people to imitate. Leviticus 19:33–34 tightens the command until there is no room to exhale: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” The grammar is identical to the second great commandment Jesus recites in the Gospels. Love the foreigner as yourself. Not as a future citizen. Not after the background check clears. As yourself, because you know what it cost to be vulnerable in a system that did not want you.

And Matthew 25:35–36: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” The text does not qualify the stranger. It does not require a legislative pathway, a favorable poll, or a clean immigration file before the invitation is extended. The passage names the outsider and the imprisoned as the specific bodies whose treatment determines the kingdom’s accounting. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The captured legalist machinery reads that passage backward. It trains its congregants that the stranger is a threat, that welcoming her is surrender, and that the handcuffs are the righteous harvest of order. The text has not changed. The operation has.

I taught this inversion from inside it. For decades I watched the religious right’s policy apparatus train successive waves of believers to read Romans 13 as total surrender of moral judgment to the state’s monopoly on force, while reading Matthew 25 as a private charity suggestion that expires at the church door. The chasm between the Gospel’s plain language and the legalisms that sanctify border cruelty is wide enough to drive a full detention bus through. When the administration’s spokesperson redirects the adjective “barbaric” from the policy itself to the people the policy cages, she is deploying the same rhetorical mechanism the churchly infrastructure perfected long before TikTok existed. Flip the moral register so the congregation can vote for the cage while calling it righteousness. The theology follows the money.

The TikTok was not the caprice of a junior staffer. It was a deliberate bid to purchase aesthetic consent. The administration is spending $70 billion on the agencies that detain and remove people, and it understands that the money will meet resistance unless removal looks normal — looks, in fact, like the thing you already do when you scroll. A beat drops. A man is handcuffed. The caption is a joke. You keep scrolling. Caitlin Dickerson’s 2022 Atlantic investigation documented the detention-to-deportation pipeline that separates parents from children, and the ICE arrest quota system the administration is expanding ensures detention numbers function as a performance metric. Sync the footage to a summer hit, mute the artist’s objection, and post. The production values are excellent.

But the vocal performance of the “secure border” demands two silences. The detained must not sing. And the pop star who does sing, who objects to singing for this, must be deleted. Both silences are necessary to the production. The first is achieved through the physical removal of people. The second through the deletion of a comment box. Both happened Monday.

The women in my own pew still sing about a God who “brings down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.” The verse has not moved. The cage has just gotten louder, and the singers have stopped hearing themselves.