Recruitment advertisements for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are no longer running on Spotify, the streaming service has confirmed. Variety was the first outlet to report the news.
Last October, Spotify held firm in its decision to air immigration-enforcement ads between songs for users on the company’s free tier. “This advertisement is part of a broad campaign the US government is running across television, streaming, and online channels,” the company said in a statement. “The content does not violate our advertising policies.”
Spotify now says the ads stopped running at the end of 2025—meaning Wednesday’s fatal shooting of a Minnesota woman by an ICE agent did not play a factor in the ads’ disappearance. “The advertisements mentioned were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms,” a spokesperson said in a statement to Pitchfork, adding that the ads “ended on most platforms and channels, including Spotify, at the end of last year.”
The campaign—which also included Amazon and YouTube, among others—was part of the Trump administration’s $30 billion investment to hire more than 10,000 deportation officers by the end of 2025. News that Spotify was airing ICE commercials was met with widespread criticism from fans and artists, leading to a general boycott of the streamer by grassroots political organization Indivisible.
In statement, Indivisible co-founder and co-director Ezra Levin said, “These ads were part of a Trump-backed effort to supercharge deportations and normalize state violence. Ending these ads does not erase the damage done, and it does not absolve Spotify and other tech companies that take government money to promote recruitment for deportation machines. Accountability means ensuring these ads never return, increasing transparency around government advertising and committing to policies that do not enable violence against our communities.
In 2019, musicians launched a separate boycott called No Music for ICE aimed at Amazon over its own ICE contracts.
This story has been updated with a statement from Indivisible.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated when No Music for ICE launched; it was in 2019, not 2025.
