Indivisible, the organization behind the No Kings protests, is escalating its pressure campaign against Spotify with an argument that has become increasingly difficult to dismiss. For months, the world’s most powerful music platform has functioned as a delivery system for Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment propaganda. And after the murder of Renee Nicole Macklin Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis yesterday, it’s all the harder to pretend that this arrangement belongs to the realm of abstraction or policy debate.
For months, Spotify has run recruitment ads for ICE, an agency now openly engaged in what its own internal documents describe as a “wartime recruitment” push. These ads have circulated quietly through the platform’s free tier, slipping into listening sessions with the same frictionless ease as mattress discounts or meal kits. Spotify has acknowledged their presence and defended them with the same explanation each time: the ads are part of a “broad campaign” by the U.S. government; they do not violate Spotify’s advertising policies; users who object can train the algorithm by clicking a thumbs-down button. It is an elegant piece of corporate rhetoric, carefully engineered to reframe moral responsibility as a question of user preference—an algorithmic fig leaf offered as if personalized annoyance is the same thing as accountability.
On January 2, the first day Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström formally took over as Spotify’s co-CEOs, Indivisible sent them an open letter calling on the company to immediately terminate all advertising contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, and publicly commit to updating its ad policy to prohibit “government propaganda and hate-based recruitment ad campaigns.” The letter avoided the language of boycott theatrics or culture-war grievance. Instead, it framed Spotify as what it is: a company with extraordinary cultural reach, one whose listeners might reasonably expect that their attention would not be monetized in service of state violence.
Five days later, that argument acquired a brutal specificity. In Minneapolis, ICE agents killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and a U.S. citizen, under circumstances that had nothing to do with immigration enforcement and everything to do with the unchecked authority the agency wields. Good was not being detained, arrested, or accused of any crime. She was attempting to drive away after being instructed to do so. An agent fired multiple shots into her face as her neighbors watched. Her car veered off the road, its glove compartment filled not with contraband but with children’s toys.
Officials quickly reached for the same self-defense script that follows these killings with grim regularity, but the much-circulated video of the encounter collapses that narrative on contact. What made the killing a national story was not its aberrance but its clarity: a moment in which the distance vanished between ICE’s euphemistic vocabulary—“mission,” “enforcement,” “public safety”—and the reality that language exists to obscure, which is the routine exercise of lethal force, even against a citizen who was complying, leaving, and posing no threat at all.
Indivisible’s contention is that it is obscene to help staff an agency whose authority is exercised at gunpoint and then pretend that the platform facilitating that effort is merely “hosting” content, as if recruiting armed agents were morally interchangeable with selling Tempur-Pedic pillows. This is not a neutral act of ad compliance. It is a choice to confer cultural legitimacy on a recruitment drive for an agency that regularly violates even the most basic of human rights.
And what makes Spotify’s role especially corrosive is that music itself has become integral to ICE’s recruitment strategy. The agency’s current hiring blitz has leaned heavily on pop aesthetics—familiar songs, meme formats, and short-form montage language—to rebrand enforcement as purpose-driven, communal, even fun. Detainment footage is soundtracked to Sabrina Carpenter; raids are packaged with Olivia Rodrigo hooks. The promise isn’t just a paycheck or a signing bonus; it’s belonging, mission, and meaning, all smuggled in through the cultural shorthand of entertainment. In other words, music isn’t incidental to these ads—it is the bait itself. And when Spotify agrees to run them, it turns the intimacy of listening into a recruitment funnel, allowing the affective power of art to be repurposed in service of an ever-expanding enforcement machine.
Defenders of Spotify have noted that DHS’ reported spend on Spotify is relatively small compared to other platforms; Rolling Stone cited an industry source estimating Spotify received about $74,000 from DHS for the ads. But that “it’s not much money” defense just strengthens the indictment: if the revenue is that marginal, then the company’s refusal to draw a bright ethical line looks less like necessity and more like preference.
Indivisible’s broader campaign—branded “Don’t Stream Fascism: Cancel Spotify”—calls on users to cancel their Spotify Premium subscriptions until the ads are removed, framing Spotify Wrapped–style engagement as free marketing for a platform it describes as “wrapped in complicity.” The coalition has tied the ICE ads to Spotify’s wider legitimacy crisis, including artist boycotts and long-simmering tensions over how the company exploits cultural labor while insulating itself from consequence.
Spotify can keep repeating that the ads “don’t violate policy.” The open letter’s argument—even sharper now, a week later, given the events in Minneapolis—is that the policy is the problem. When a company with Spotify’s cultural reach insists it is merely a neutral pipe for state recruitment messaging, it is describing a business model, not a moral position. And when that model is explicitly built to expand an enforcement machine that regularly terrorizes communities, neutrality becomes little more than a carefully branded synonym for approval.
ED. UPDATE: When reached out to for comment, a Spotify representative told Paste that “there are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify. The advertisements mentioned were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms.” When asked to clarify whether Spotify had actually terminated its advertisement contract with ICE or if the ICE campaign had simply concluded (and Spotify would be willing to host another one in the future), the representative replied, “All I can tell you is that the campaign on Spotify ended at the end of last year,” which was only eight days ago. They continued by saying: “I can’t speculate on hypothetical future campaigns but, as is the case with all major platforms, any future ads need to adhere to the company’s policies.” This implies that Spotify has not terminated its partnership with ICE, as ICE’s previous campaign was deemed fit for “the company’s policies,” and based on the representative’s comment, it seems Spotify has no qualms with hosting any future ICE advertisements, so long as they are similar to the ones already run. This story is still developing.
![Spotify's continued platforming of ICE is indefensible [UPDATED]](https://img.pastemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/08105750/7228872F-4419-4895-8E69-B8CD7C7CE166.jpeg)
Keep scrolling for more great stories.