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Commentary: The DHS keeps poaching music for ICE recruitment ads. Musicians keep demanding it back

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Commentary: The DHS keeps poaching music for ICE recruitment ads. Musicians keep demanding it back

Another week, another pop star angry that their song was used without their permission in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment ad.

Singer Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Juno” appeared as the soundtrack for a Department of Homeland Security promotional video posted on the official X account of the White House. It featured a montage of clips appearing to show ICE officers chasing down, tackling and handcuffing people in what looks to be the city of Chicago. The lyrics — “Wanna try out some freaky positions? Have you ever tried this one?” — from the song play atop the footage.

“[T]his video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter posted on Tuesday. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”

Too late, since the DHS had already done it without her knowledge.

Using the work of pop music performers minus their consent is the only way the White House can score their ICE campaign with music clips that actually appeal to people younger than 50.

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The list of luminaries who have condemned the agency’s actions or filed legal copyright removal requests (Jay-Z had his song “Public Service Announcement” struck from a DHS social media post) reads like a sold-out Coachella lineup: Jay-Z, Olivia Rodrigo, MGMT, Zach Bryan, The Cure, Usher, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. It also includes the estates and companies that represent Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” Pokémon’s original theme song “Gotta Catch ’Em All” and the “Wicked” soundtrack’s “Defying Gravity” as sung by Cynthia Erivo.

As for the catalog of bona fide stars and meme-made celebs who have expressed gratitude for hearing their work in an ICE detainment video? There is no such list.

From the Stones to Springsteen to Swift, GOP campaigns, rallies and election-year ads have featured the music of performers who didn’t want their songs associated with Reagan’s trickle-down economics, either Bush administration’s Gulf war, or Trump’s scorched-earth policies. There wasn’t, and still isn’t, a wealth of popular artists who openly embrace right-wing ideals. Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood, the latter of whom teamed up with Trump to release a “God Bless the USA” bible, can’t do it all.

The right’s strategy has been to use a song once, knowing that a copyright infringement complaint will likely follow, then avoid further legal action by moving on to another artist’s work. Call it poach and run.

But the DHS, like Trump’s White House, has added another element to its grift by capitalizing on the complaints that follow its theft of popular songs.

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Carpenter’s response to her song being used without her consent was met with a trolling retort from the DHS. The department weaponized the singer’s own lyrics against her to capitalize on the negative attention (a hallmark of MAGA’s winning strategy in gaming the attention economy).

“Here’s a Short n’ Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter: we won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement, referencing Carpenter’s recent single “Manchild” and the title of her 2024 album, “Short n’ Sweet.”

Crazy idea: The administration might also catch pedophiles and rapists by releasing unredacted copies of the Epstein files. But how to turn that ugliness into a “fun” video with a quippy caption?

The DHS was forced to remove MGMT’s “Little Dark Age” from an ICE recruitment ad after the band issued a takedown request. The video, posted in October, showed agents arresting protesters outside an ICE facility in Portland, Ore. It was captioned: “End of the Dark Age, beginning of the Golden Age.”

The White House also used British singer Jess Glynne’s 2015 single “Hold My Hand,” a song that recently made a comeback in a viral Jet2 holiday ad, to promote its deportation operation over the summer. The DHS posted the song clip to its official social media channels, along with the caption: “When ICE books you a one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation. Nothing beats it!”

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Glynne and the airline company condemned the ad. But by then, the DHS was on to the next song by an artist who wanted nothing to do with them.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA

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Movie Review – SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA
SHAKA: A STORY OF ALOHA is shared with the audience by investigator Steve Sue in a calm and charming manner, but this documentary tells a powerful, positive and fascinating story. The “hang loose” thumb, pinky sign that originated in Hawaii and carries many meanings is the focus of this film. I just learned this gesture is called a “Shaka” and has a worldwide impact.  And, there are Shaka Contests.  Who knew? And how do you throw a Shaka? For me, […]
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Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day

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Tommy Lee Jones’ daughter reportedly found dead at San Francisco hotel on New Year’s Day

Victoria Jones, the daughter of Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones, was reportedly found dead at a hotel in San Francisco on New Year’s Day. She was 34.

According to TMZ, the San Francisco Fire Department responded to a medical emergency call at the Fairmont San Francisco early Thursday morning. The paramedics pronounced Victoria dead at the scene before turning it over to the San Francisco Police Department for further investigation, the outlet said.

An SFPD representative confirmed to The Times that officers responded to a call at approximately 3:14 a.m. Thursday regarding a report of a deceased person at the hotel and that they met with medics at the scene who declared an unnamed adult female dead.

Citing law enforcement sources, NBC Bay Area also reported that the deceased woman found in a hallway of the hotel was believed to be Jones and that police did not suspect foul play.

“We are deeply saddened by an incident that occurred at the hotel on January 1, 2026,” the Fairmont told NBC Bay Area in a statement. “Our heartfelt condolences are with the family and loved ones during this very difficult time. The hotel team is actively cooperating and supporting police authorities within the framework of the ongoing investigation.”

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The medical examiner conducted an investigation at the scene, but Jones’ cause of death remains undetermined. Dispatch audio obtained by TMZ and People indicated that the 911 emergency call was for a suspected drug overdose.

Jones was the daughter of Tommy Lee and ex-wife Kimberlea Cloughley. Her brief acting career included roles on films such as “Men in Black II” (2002), which starred her father, and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005), which was directed by her father. She also appeared in a 2005 episode of “One Tree Hill.”

Page Six reported that Jones had been arrested at least twice in 2025 in Napa County, including an arrest on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance and drug possession.

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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me

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Movie Review: “I Was a Stranger” and You Welcomed Me

Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.

“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”

The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.

But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.

Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.

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“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.

“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.

“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.

“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.

And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.

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Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.

Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.

The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.

Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.

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“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.

Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.

But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.

And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

star

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs

Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis

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Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:43

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine

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