White House Co‑Opts Bad Bunny’s ‘La Mudanza’ for Deportation Propaganda

On Thursday, the official White House TikTok account shared a video that paired a snippet of Bad Bunny’s “La Mudanza” with footage of ICE detentions and a caption congratulating Donald Trump. The clip, which cuts between the former president’s public appearances and migrants being taken into custody, uses the track’s celebratory chorus—a tribute to the artist’s parents—as a backdrop for the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The choice is jarring in ways that go beyond ordinary political tone-deafness. “La Mudanza,” from the album Debí Tirar Más Fotos, is one of Bad Bunny’s most overtly political works. Its video references Eugenio María de Hostos and the blue flag of Puerto Rico’s independence movement, and the lyrics confront the killing of activists for waving that flag. The track operates as anticolonial resistance, rooted in the island’s history as a U.S. territory since 1898.

Bad Bunny has long been an unapologetic critic of Trump’s policies, from the disastrous hurricane response in Puerto Rico to the criminalization of immigrants. Representatives for the artist did not respond to a request for comment. The administration’s social media accounts have made a pattern of using musicians’ work without consent, often to provoke outrage. But lifting a song that explicitly mourns state violence to celebrate deportations crosses from trolling into a glaring misread of what the music actually stands for.