I saw an Internet meme a couple of weeks ago that read "You know it's a bad sign when the folk music is good again." Folklorist/musician Ceallaigh was like "Ain't that the truth?" But my Instagram feed was already full of folk songs about the ICE raids in California, Illinois, Minnesota and elsewhere, and I'm aware that social injustice and expressive culture have a well-established relationship.

After I read the meme, I started collecting those Instagram songs and went looking for more elsewhere on the Internet. I found a variety of musical responses to ICE with a variety of intended audiences, from Los Jornaleros del Norte's catchy middle finger "Le Cumbia De La Migra" to Heidi Wilson's simple but powerful "Hold On." This Special Dispatch highlights some of these musical responses and provides a bit of folkloristics to help unpack their performative contexts. I'll also be dividing them into songs of protest, satire, tribute, and solidarity in line with ethnomusicologist David King Dunway's scholarship in “Music and Politics in the United States.”^[1]