The signs began to emerge early on Sunday afternoon, as music stars filtered into the Grammy festivities in downtown Los Angeles, many of them sporting black-and-white pins that read “ICE OUT.”
That message, directed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, burst into public view about an hour into the televised broadcast, when Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar who has been derided by the White House and right-wing media, accepted the award for best música urbána album.
“Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ‘ICE out,’” Bad Bunny said, to a roaring standing ovation. “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”
It was clear this was going to be the most politicized Grammy ceremony in years.
Throughout the night, artists used their time at the microphone to show solidarity with immigrants and to condemn the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, following the recent killings of two protesters by federal agents in Minneapolis.
Billie Eilish, accepting song of the year for a record-setting third time, said, “No one is illegal on stolen land,” then castigated ICE with a blunt profanity that was censored from the TV broadcast.
Others were less polemical. The British singer Olivia Dean, accepting best new artist, called herself “a granddaughter of an immigrant,” and added: “I’m a product of bravery, and I believe those people deserve to be celebrated.”
But it was comments from the show’s host, the comedian Trevor Noah, that drew the ire of President Trump.
Noah, hosting the Grammys for the sixth and last time, needled Trump throughout the show. He said that song of the year “is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland. Which makes sense because Epstein’s island is gone. He needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton.”
In a late-night post on Truth Social, his social media platform, Trump threatened to sue Noah and called the Grammys “the WORST, virtually unwatchable!” The president added, “Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!”
Comments like Noah’s posed a risk for the Grammys, as well as for CBS. Last year Paramount, CBS’s parent company, agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris on CBS’s flagship newsmagazine, “60 Minutes.” Also last year, CBS canceled “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” which is regularly critical of Trump (the network called it “purely a financial decision”).
Bad Bunny ended up dominating Grammy night. Although Kendrick Lamar won more awards, with five, Bad Bunny’s three trophies included album of the year for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which became the first all-Spanish album to win the top award in the Grammys’ 68-year history. On Sunday, he is set to give the first halftime performance all in Spanish at the Super Bowl.
President Trump has taken aim at Bad Bunny as well. In a recent interview he called the singer “a terrible choice” for the Super Bowl.
A representative of the Recording Academy declined to comment. Representatives for CBS did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.
The Grammys have occasionally had political or socially minded segments on the show. In 2018, Hillary Clinton read excerpts from a book about Trump. In a recorded segment in 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, made a plea for support in his country’s war against Russia. In a choreographed segment in 2014, the Grammys married 34 same-sex couples, a year before the Supreme Court required all states to recognize those unions.
But on Sunday, the political messaging came from artists, as Grammy producers presented a largely standard show of entertainment, with lauded performances by Justin Bieber and Lola Young.
Larry Miller, the executive director of the Sony Audio Institute for Music Business and Technology at New York University, did not fault the Grammys for taking a back seat while artists expressed themselves.
“Great artists speak their truth, and we may love them for it,” Miller said. “They are beholden to no company and certainly not to CBS.”
“Artists who spoke out last night did so on only one issue,” he added, “and it was core to their identities — immigration — and the administration’s violent response. It wasn’t the Recording Academy’s job to take a position.”
The “ICE OUT” buttons were organized by a team of activists including Working Families Power, a group affiliated with the Working Families Party, as part of a campaign called Be Good-ICE Out in response to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
A handful of actors wore the buttons at the Golden Globes, which took place four days after Good was shot and killed in her car by a federal agent. For the Grammys, the groups fanned out to reach as many artists as they could, setting up distribution centers in hotels and music venues in Los Angeles, Nelini Stamp, the director of strategy for Working Families Power, said in an interview on Monday.
“We had folks asking for the pins by the middle of the ceremony,” Stamp said.
Artists wearing the pins included Bieber, Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Kehlani, Joni Mitchell and Carole King, who wore it perhaps most conspicuously when she presented song of the year.
King’s pin was also notably larger than many others seen on Grammy night, some of which were so small they were barely legible on TV screens. The campaign made multiple sizes of the pins, Stamp said, after getting tips from artists’ stylists.
“We want to be respectful,” Stamp said. “Folks choose their outfits sometimes months before.”
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