The White House has found a new content format: deportation highlight reels set to chart-topping music, distributed on TikTok.
Two videos published by the administration show ICE arrests, border footage, and detained migrants — soundtracked, respectively, by Bad Bunny's LA MuDANZA and Drake's Hoe Phase. The clip featuring the Puerto Rican artist appeared on July 30 on the White House's official TikTok account. A second video followed on Friday with the Drake track, accompanied by on-screen text reading: 'Let us remind you that if you are here illegally, you will be going home.'
Here's the thing. Bad Bunny is not exactly a willing collaborator. The artist has publicly criticized Trump's immigration policies, used his platform to push back against anti-immigrant rhetoric, and excluded the United States from his most recent world tour. The White House used his music anyway — and went further, altering a lyric from LA MuDANZA on screen, translating and rewriting it as 'A round of applause for Donald J. Trump because he really crushed it.' That is not a sample. That is a rewrite.
As of publication, neither Bad Bunny nor his representatives have commented publicly on the use of the song.
The administration's choice of format is deliberate. Short-form video set to recognizable tracks is the grammar of TikTok, and the White House is fluent in it. The montage — agents, aircraft, handcuffs, a smiling president — is engineered to go viral, borrowing the visual language of a campaign ad and the audio of a playlist. The irony of using a Latin artist's catalog to celebrate a deportation campaign aimed largely at Latin American migrants is either lost on the team that made it, or is the entire point.
The demo is not the product, but in this case the demo is the message. Whether the videos constitute fair use, whether the artists have legal recourse, and whether TikTok will act on any takedown request are all open questions the White House appears unconcerned with.
Voltage take: The administration is running a content strategy, not just an immigration policy — and it is working on its own terms. Virality is the benchmark, and posting ICE footage to Bad Bunny beats a press release in the algorithm every time. The real question is whether artists whose work is appropriated for political messaging they explicitly oppose have any practical remedy, or whether the White House's TikTok account operates above the usual rules of the platform. Read the changelog: it ships when it ships, and the content keeps coming.
