A Republican senator is demanding out musician Billie Eilish return her Grammy because she criticized ICE.

Eilish has faced criticism from the right since this past weekend when she won the Grammy for Song of the Year for “Wildflower.” During her acceptance speech, she asserted that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” a reference to immigration policy.

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Now, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is demanding she give up her Grammy as well as her home.

“There can be no Grammys on stolen land, I think,” Schmitt told YouTuber Nicholas Ballasy yesterday. “I think Billie Eilish ought to give the Grammy back and probably her mansion, which, I guess, is on stolen land, too. It’s ridiculous. It’s… These people are completely out of touch, and so, whatever. Yeah.”

Right-wing media spent part of the week criticizing Eilish as “a blithering idiot,” arguing that she should not be allowed to own her home in LA because it was built “where the Tongva tribes once lived.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Tongva Nation of the Greater Los Angeles Basin said: “We do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country.”

The backlash even made it into a Senate hearing when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) brought it up while questioning Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos about a possible merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, even though it didn’t have anything to do with the merger.

Sen. Schmitt has a history of opposing LGBTQ+ rights, getting a score of “0” on HRC’s Congressional Scorecard in the last session of Congress due to his solid opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. In 2019, when he was the Missouri attorney general, he joined a brief for the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination despite its ban on discrimination on the basis of sex. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected his argument the next year in its Bostock v. Clayton Co. decision.

Last year, Schmitt attended a fringe right-wing conference that had panels with titles like “Overturn Obergefell” – the case that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states – and “The Bible and American Renewal.” Schmitt gave a speech where he denounced legal immigration and said, “America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us.”

“Our people tamed the continent, built a civilization from the wilderness,” he said at the time. So he probably does not believe that the Tongva Nation has a claim to the homes built on their ancestral land and was just saying that to attack Eilish.

Earlier this week, Schmitt too denounced Netflix as having “the wokest content in the history of the world” during a Senate hearing where other Republicans attacked Netflix for having some shows with LGBTQ+ characters.

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