Spotify Tap Dances on ICE Advertising Issue, Says Recruitment Spots Are Not Currently Running

Spotify says there are no ICE ads currently running on the platform, but the company is far from changing its stance on the matter.

After facing criticism last year for running recruitment ads for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on its platform, Spotify has released a statement asserting that the campaign is no longer running. But the announcement doesn’t mean that Spotify has changed its position on the partnership.

“There are currently no ICE ads running on Spotify,” the company’s statement reads. “The advertisements mentioned were part of a U.S. government recruitment campaign that ran across all major media and platforms.”

The recruitment campaign was running on platforms including Hulu, HBO Max, YouTube, and Pandora as early as April 2025. According to Rolling Stone, Spotify received $74,000 from the Department of Homeland Security to run their ads; Google and YouTube were paid $3 million on Spanish-language advertising promoting self-deportation.

Spotify’s statement makes it clear that the campaign has concluded—but that appears to be the only reason the recruitment ads are no longer playing on major platforms. ICE is no longer paying the service to continue the advertising campaign, at least for now.

When asked to confirm or deny whether the company was still in bed with the government agency—which shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis yesterday—a Spotify representative told Paste that “the campaign on Spotify ended at the end of last year.” Paste notes that the language only indicates that the campaign passively ended, not that it was actively terminated.

Spotify previously doubled down on the assertion the content of the ICE campaign “does not violate our advertising policies,” and paired with the company’s latest remarks, it implies that the platform would take no issue with hosting another recruitment campaign for the government agency in the future.

“The ads are gone only because the money is, and the company remains careful not to say what it will not do,” writes Paste. “By declining to rule out future ICE campaigns—by insisting, even now, on the sufficiency of a policy it has already used to justify months of recruitment ads for an agency that killed a U.S. citizen 24 hours ago—Spotify is making clear that this is not a reckoning but a pause.”

Whether Spotify or other major platforms will continue to do business with the government agency in the future remains to be seen, but the door is certainly being deliberately left ajar for another advertising campaign should companies like Spotify, YouTube, and Hulu deem it sufficiently profitable.