Sabrina Carpenter Rips White House ICE Video

The White House’s official account on X shared a new video Thursday, soundtracked by Sabrina Carpenter’s song ‘Juno,’ and the pop star is none too happy about it. The clip, which depicts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining migrants, was quickly denounced by Carpenter, sparking a familiar battle over the political appropriation of popular music.

What the White House’s ICE enforcement video shows

The mash-up juxtaposes thrilling visions of ICE operations with the plonky pulse of Carpenter’s ‘Juno,’ a fan favorite from her Short n’ Sweet era. The edit embraces a viral aesthetic — tight cutting, big signposting and being more than recognizable but for one hook — designed to spike thanks to maximum shareability on popular social platforms.

It’s a formula for what we might call, with love in our hearts, clickbait. X has long been telling us video posts drive more engagement than text alone and political accounts are increasingly embracing creator-style editing to maximize reach. The point here is to set a bit of mainstream pop against arrest footage: aggravate, polarize, pass around.

Carpenter condemns the use of ‘Juno’ in ICE video

Carpenter condemned the X video as “evil” and “disgusting,” asking that she be left alone to promote what she described as a humane cause unattached from her music. Her massed fan base, across Instagram, TikTok and X, heard it quickly and began bombarding her label and publishers with pleas to give it away.

The moment comes at the crest of Carpenter’s cultural footprint. After ‘Juno’ conquered that, filling arenas and releasing chart-topping singles, it became a staple of her live show because of its playful choreography and instantly recognizable lyric. It is that resonance that made the track a logical choice for the government’s viral gambit — and its backlash all but inevitable.

White House fires back, defends ICE deportation video

The White House hit back within hours with a statement provided to Fox News Digital, riffing on the title of Carpenter’s album and vowing not to apologize for deportations it described as dealing with dangerous criminals. The combative tone reflected a broader communications strategy that critics have said dehumanizes migrants in order to energize the president’s base.

This is not a one-off. The account has relied time and again on memes and viral edits to repackage immigration enforcement as shareable entertainment, the type of media that can invite outrage, applause — but more importantly attract attention.

Can the White House use her song without permission?

Legally, the answer is complicated — and more often than not, not what political accounts want to hear. ASCAP and BMI public performance licenses do not include synchronization, the pairing of music to video. For sync rights, permission is needed from both the recording owner (usually a label) and the song’s publishers. Government or campaign accounts can’t simply defer to a platform’s all-encompassing user agreements for that.

However, in practice artists and rights holders typically challenge tweeted videos by filing takedown requests under platform copyright tools or the DMCA. Industry groups like the RIAA and the National Music Publishers’ Association have supported creators who are resisting unauthorized political uses. In 2020, the Artist Rights Alliance convened an open letter signed by dozens of high-profile artists that urged campaigns to stop using songs without permission.

Past confrontations provide a roadmap. The estates of Tom Petty and Prince, as well as the Rolling Stones, Rihanna, Adele and Neil Young have also protested political uses of their music — in some cases going so far as to formally threaten legal action. Whether Carpenter’s team will follow with a copyright claim could shape how long the video stays online.

The strategy behind controversy-driven enforcement clips

Combining a viral pop hook with images of brute enforcement is an exploitation hack. It harnesses the artist’s accumulated cultural capital — listeners, trends and algorithms — to turn policy into entertainment. And while it might bring a spike in reach, the blowback of a star with tens of millions of followers can subsume any short-term benefits, flipping the script from “tough on crime” to “exploiting art for politics.”

The Pew Research Center has found that political content is concentrated among a small number of highly active users and that polarized posts travel farther. This dynamic is the mother’s milk for outrage moments like this. But it also raises brand-safety concerns for government: When a high-profile artist publicly denounces your message, the collateral damage can match or override the impressions.

What comes next in the White House–Carpenter dispute

Keep an eye out for a formal response from Carpenter’s label and publishers — probably a takedown notice or licensing challenge, especially if one-time X member Gordon orders the same. Also look for: if the White House has dug in with similar edits or turns to licensed stock tracks in order to avoid future fights.

For the moment, the episode highlights a fact of life in politics today: pop music is a battleground. When the smoothing of government-media relations collides with an artist’s brand, backlash is swift and transnational and difficult to control — and the sound can transform a story as much as the images alone.