Ariana Grande condemned the White House on Tuesday for using her 2024 Eternal Sunshine track “Bye” in a TikTok video promoting Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, calling the move “barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense” in a public statement that drew immediate response across her label, her management and the federal-PR account that posted the original clip. The song was removed from the video hours after Grande’s complaint.
The video posted on the official White House TikTok account on June 9 featured a montage of ICE arrests synced to the chorus of “Bye,” a track Grande co-wrote with Max Martin and Ilya Salmanzadeh for the Eternal Sunshine album cycle. Grande, who has been politically vocal during the 2026 cycle in posts supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’s policy agenda, addressed the use through her management’s official Instagram and X channels and through a follow-up Substack post on her personal account.
“This is barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense,” she wrote, addressing what she described as the administration’s repurposing of her music for a goal she has publicly and repeatedly opposed. USA Today, which broke the cross-platform story, reported her management filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request through TikTok’s rights-management portal within an hour of the post going live; TikTok’s enforcement team removed the audio from the video later in the day, although the visual track remains live.
Us Weekly reported Grande’s statement was the first time a sitting performer with a six-times-platinum streaming track has openly forced a federal-account walk-back inside a 24-hour window. The White House’s deputy press secretary later posted a defensive follow-up, framing the original video’s intent around what the administration described as immigrant-involved crime rather than the broader enforcement Grande’s statement criticized, but did not re-add the audio or comment on the rights-claim mechanism that brought the song down.
Grande, 32, has spent the past 18 months alternating between musical and acting work, with her Wicked: For Good theatrical run with Cynthia Erivo through November 2025 standing as the most-commercially-successful credit of her career and her Eternal Sunshine deluxe edition continuing to lift the original album back into the Billboard 200’s top 25 through 2025. “Bye,” the track in question, was the album’s promotional second single and peaked at No. 16 on the Hot 100.
The federal-account use of pop tracks for enforcement messaging has been a recurring 2025 and 2026 pattern. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have used songs from Toby Keith, Sam Smith and Halsey across the past 18 months, each generating its own takedown-and-pushback cycle. Grande’s response stands out for the speed and the legal-mechanism specificity, and for the fact that she did not soften her position after the administration’s defensive reply.
The clash also sits inside a broader 2026 stretch of high-profile Hollywood-to-Washington pushback. Dennis Quaid’s Friday remarks about Los Angeles “going downhill” sat in a different ideological register, which we covered in our CMA Fest dispatch, but tracks the same broader pattern of celebrity politics breaking into the mid-week news cycle. Taylor Swift’s Songwriters Hall of Fame induction Thursday, where Steven Spielberg filmed her dancing with Travis Kelce, is the same calendar week’s apolitical analog, per our coverage.
Republic Records, Grande’s label of record since 2013, has not publicly commented on the takedown request but signaled internally that the response was company-coordinated rather than artist-only. The label’s standing position on pop catalogs being used in political video work is restrictive and has been increasingly so since the post-2020 cycle, with management groups including Grande’s enforcing pre-approval requirements for all non-commercial federal uses.
Grande is in pre-production on her next theatrical project, an as-yet-untitled musical from Jon M. Chu announced for late-2027 release. She is also a producer on the Wicked: The Untold spinoff currently being scripted for a 2028 launch. The Bye-and-White-House clash, by industry-tracker framing, is unlikely to disrupt either credit but is expected to surface in interview cycles through the next several months. The original TikTok with the song removed remained live on the White House account as of Saturday morning.
