Songfacts®:

• "Pretend You Remember Me" is a politically charged protest song released by Tom Morello in July 2025. The track promotes immigrant rights and condemns US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions.
• Tom Morello wrote the song in response to a Trump-era immigration crackdown in which ICE and, in some cases, National Guard and Marines, carried out aggressive raids in Los Angeles that forcibly separated long-settled immigrant families. People were detained in grocery store parking lots and front yards, then disappeared into a bureaucratic maze without hearings or due process. Parents went to work and didn't come home. Kids came home from school to a quiet house. It is "Take The Power Back," except nobody gets the power back.
• Morello reminded us that this isn't a red vs. blue issue so much as a decades-long bipartisan catastrophe. "It was there with Biden," he told Billboard. "It was there with Trump's first term. It was there with Obama... My heart goes out to all the families throughout all of these years who've been torn apart."
• Zakk Cervini produced the song. Known for his work in rock and alternative music, Cervini has produced albums for a wide range of artists, such as Blink-182, All Time Low and Bring Me The Horizon. His previous collaborations with Morello include the guitarist's cover of "Highway to Hell" and his 2024 single "Soldier In The Army Of Love."
• The music video, directed by Morello, is part documentary, part indictment, part Rage-style street-theater montage. Faces of real families affected by ICE are spliced between clips of White House press briefings where officials try to explain why something obviously cruel isn't technically cruel.
  
  The video opens with Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist and political prisoner whose life sentence was commuted by President Biden, delivering a powerful message: "No human being is illegal."
• "Pretend You Remember Me" was released in collaboration with CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, which fights the kind of small, grinding injustices that don't make headlines unless someone like Morello plugs in a guitar and screams about them.