Spotify stopped running ICE ads at the end of 2025. On Thursday, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed to Rolling Stone that the platform was no longer running recruitment ads for the government agency after its latest campaign, which spanned multiple platforms, came to an end at the end of last year.
“Yes, there are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify,” the spokesperson tells Rolling Stone. “The advertisements mentioned were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms. The campaign ended on most platforms and channels, including Spotify, at the end of last year.”
The new reporting comes a day after an ICE agent fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, sparking protests and uproar across the country. But according to the spokesperson, the two situations were unrelated, as the end of the ICE ads on the platform came weeks before the incident.
Spotify, and numerous streaming services such as Pandora, Spotify, and Meta, had been under scrutiny for running recruitment advertising from the Department of Homeland Security last year. The push was part of the Trump administration’s investment of $30 billion to hire at least 10,000 more deportation officers by the end of 2025, according to The Associated Press.
According to data from Equis reported by Rolling Stone in November, the Department of Homeland Security spent a combined $2.8 million on English and Spanish-language ads on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram since March 1, and another half a million on ICE recruitment ads on the platform since August. On Google and YouTube, DHS spent nearly $3 million on specifically Spanish-language advertising aimed at promoting self-deportation.
An industry source told Rolling Stone at the time that Spotify had received $74,000 from DHS to run its advertisements. That figure represents less than three percent of what the government spent on Google and Meta.
In a statement to Rolling Stone on Nov. 2, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that “hiring law enforcement officers is mission critical in order to fix the crisis the Biden administration manufactured by letting millions of criminal illegal aliens come into the country… Nothing will slow us down from recruiting more officers.”
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Thousands of people came together in Minneapolis on Wednesday for a candlelight vigil to mourn and protest the killing of Renee Nicole Good, an award-winning poet and mother of three, who was shot and killed by a masked ICE agent.
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DHS’ McLaughlin claims that the agents were targeting a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” However, video footage of the killing has suggested to numerous government leaders — including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and others — that that was not the case.
“The narrative ICE is spinning immediately after this was that this was purely self-defense, and that the act by the victim was some sort of domestic terrorism — that, I’ll say it again, is bullshit,” Frey said. “That is bullshit. The way they’ve been conducting themselves is also bullshit. And we all need to be very clear-eyed about what’s happening.”
