About That DHS Fuckery

We checked DHS’s videos of chaos and protests. Here’s what they leave out.

Trump administration videos purporting to show the triumph of recent immigration operations used footage that was months old or recorded thousands of miles away, an analysis found.

The Department of Homeland Security posted a swaggering montage to social media in August declaring it had triumphed in its takeover of Washington, D.C. It showed footage of federal agents fighting what a DHS official called a “battle for the soul of our nation” and working “day and night to arrest, detain and deport vicious criminals from our nation’s capital.”

There was one problem. Several of the clips had been recorded during unrelated operations months earlier, in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida. The official’s sound bite about deportations in D.C. played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away.

Officials in President Donald Trump’s administration have used similarly misleading footage in at least six videos promoting its immigration agenda shared in the last three months, a Washington Post analysis found, muddying the reality of events in viral clips that have been viewed millions of times.

Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states. One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term.

The Post provided DHS a detailed list of videos featuring misleading footage. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin did not dispute the errors or explain what had happened but said the videos were a small percentage of the more than 400 that the agency has posted this year. “Violence and rioting against law enforcement is unacceptable regardless of where it occurs,” she said.

The Post sent the same details to the White House. Abigail Jackson, a spokeswoman there, did not comment on the errors but said “the Trump administration will continue to highlight the many successes of the president’s agenda through engaging content and banger memes on social media.”

DHS’s video operation now includes in-house photographers and videographers who routinely capture the action of ICE raids and protest responses for videos that administration officials have widely promoted online. In a video DHS posted to X this month, a man in a Border Patrol flak jacket, his camera held aloft, can be seen jogging to catch up with officers putting a detainee into an SUV.

The administration’s intense digital strategy has helped grab Americans’ attention and shape discussion around current events, with some of its videos now capturing bigger audiences on social media than mainstream news reports. A White House video claiming Chicago was “in chaos,” which used footage from other states, has been viewed more than 1.4 million times across Instagram, TikTok and X.

But John Cohen, a former DHS official who worked on federal law enforcement and intelligence issues under both Democratic and Republican administrations, said the mix of misleading and polarizing content could weaken the administration’s ability to build trust with the American public long-term.

During his time in government, Cohen said, law enforcement and security officials worked to ensure that “any message or content we were putting out was absolutely accurate,” fearing misleading information would push people to start tuning them out during national emergencies.

“If people come to believe that what you’re saying is inaccurate or not based on an objective evaluation of a threat or emergency situation, they’re not going to pay attention or listen to you,” said Cohen, who now works at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. “The goal of a law enforcement organization should be to de-escalate. And the way you de-escalate is by providing accurate information.”

‘Soul of our nation’

The misleading example about the “battle for the soul of our nation” was offered in the form of a news-style video featuring DHS deputy assistant secretary Micah Bock. A collection of video clips showcased how the operation had worked to safeguard the “hallowed halls” of Washington, the “heart of our republic,” according to Bock.

But The Post’s analysis, which used reverse-image searches, geolocation tools and other techniques to find the clips’ original sources, found that stretches of the footage had been filmed in different places or times than DHS had presented.

Some footage came from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in L.A., according to The Post’s analysis, which matched it to a DHS press release.

Other clips came from an ICE video showing officials conducting “routine daily operations” in February in West Palm Beach. The footage had been uploaded to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, a public repository of military and law enforcement video run by the Defense Department.

A third set of video clips came from federal operations in May on the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, which ICE said led to 40 arrests. The Nantucket Current, a small local news outlet, had published photos and videos onto its website and Instagram while reporting on the arrests, during which agents detained undocumented immigrants at traffic stops and loaded them onto a patrol boat for removal.

DHS’s X account reposted the Current’s video that month. So did White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who added, “Bye bye! 👋”

“The visual of it was really jarring to see,” said Jason Graziadei, the Current’s editor in chief. “Typically when you see ICE arrests, they don’t involve a Coast Guard boat and life jackets.”

‘Antifa terrorists’

BTW - I'm kinda hard-pressed to think of anyong I've ever met who didn't at least partly identify as anti-fascist.

Are people just not thinking this shit thru?

How is anybody who claims to love our little Constitutional Republic not against fascism? 

The video wasn’t the only DHS release to use a journalist’s footage without credit — or to get its location wrong.

The freelance journalist Ford Fischer was scrolling through X earlier this month when he saw a DHS video overlaid with a message saying “antifa terrorists” had stormed federal facilities in Portland, Oregon. But he recognized the footage because he’d captured it himself days earlier, outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois.

The video, which The Post verified, had been cropped to remove Fischer’s watermark. And it seemed to bolster Trump’s claim that the Oregon city was overwhelmed by violent leftists who were “burning [it] to the ground.”

But Fischer had recorded the footage 1,700 miles away, at a prominent protest zone outside Chicago, where federal agents routinely scuffle with protesters seeking to block an ICE facility’s gate.

Fischer said he worried the video’s misleading description could warp Americans’ understanding of how the government was interacting with the public. He also questioned how the mistake was made in the first place: In Broadview, Fischer said, he saw multiple DHS officials gathering video of the scuffles, including one holding a camera-stabilizing tool known as a gimbal commonly used by professional videographers and influencers.

“They seem very media-savvy and very focused on the production of these slick high-end videos,” he said. “But it creates a sense of concern about how the work is being used and how it’s being disconnected from the original source.”

‘Resounding in their thankfulness’

Footage from the Broadview clashes was misused in another DHS video in September seeking to champion federal agents’ move into Memphis. In the video, Bock said the Tennessee city’s communities had been “abandoned to crime and lawlessness” and that residents had been “resounding in their thankfulness” when DHS moved in.

But in the video, Bock spoke over clips showing armed guards outside the ICE facility in Illinois, more than 500 miles away. The video, which was bookended by footage showing Memphis landmarks and its mayor, gave no indication it was recorded in a different state.

‘Decimated our way of life’

Beyond getting its places wrong, the DHS videos have also given incorrect dates.

In a video from this month saying Trump had “secured our nation,” DHS shared clips it said showed how past administrations’ failures had let in criminals who “decimated our way of life.” One showed a middle-of-the-night crossing of the Southern border, while another showed a smuggling boat.

The video did not mention, however, that both scenes had played out in 2019, the third year of Trump’s first term. The border-crossing video was posted to DVIDS and came from a Border Patrol checkpoint in Arizona. The boat clip — which DHS labeled as coming from New York — was taken from a Coast Guard interception in international waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away, a DVIDS entry shows.

‘Chicago is in chaos’

The White House has made notable errors in its own video operation, posting a video this month that claimed “Chicago is in chaos” and said the city “doesn’t need political spin — it needs HELP.”

The video, however, recycled footage from a months-old ICE operation in Florida, not far from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. A fact-checker at Agence France-Presse also found other clips in the video had come from operations in Arizona, California, Nebraska, South Carolina and Texas, some of which had been recorded during President Joe Biden’s time in office.

In a statement to the Daily Beast, which first reported the mismatch, a spokesman for Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) made a joke about one of the video’s more notable telltale details. Chicago, he said, isn’t known for its palm trees.

‘I really appreciate you guys’

In one case, ICE posted a photo that many people suspected was false but was mostly accurate.

Earlier this month, ICE’s X account shared a photo of a woman holding a sign outside its facility in Portland that read, “I really appreciate you guys!” Many users argued the image was a fake, saying the strange angles of her arm, the odd contours of the sign and the visual artifacts around the edges of her body suggested the image had been doctored or generated by artificial intelligence.

DHS shared surveillance video of the scene with The Post showing the woman with the sign was real. But an examination of the footage by The Post and independent analysts also found that the photo had been retouched in a way the agency did not disclose. On the sidewalk under the woman’s feet, someone had written, “Chinga la migra” — a Spanish-language curse against the immigration authorities. Most of the message was removed in the image shared by ICE, save for two of the letters visible behind her legs.

The flawed clips show the risks for the administration as it pushes to build support and capture attention through the social media and online-video feeds many Americans now view as their sources for news.

The department has invested in a nationwide social media ad campaign warning undocumented immigrants they should leave the country or be “hunted down.” It also recently bought a $28,000 Skydio X10D drone to add to its aerial recording fleet; ICE this month posted a drone video of protesters clashing with officers onto its Facebook page.

Some of that real-world footage has been used in the department’s trolling memes and dark jokes around mass deportation. One clip, showing a home’s door being blown off as part of a Chicago ICE operation, was used in a video splicing together detained immigrants with Pokémon soundtracked to the cartoon’s theme song, “Gotta Catch ’Em All.”

The White House explained the administration’s strategy of online irreverence in March by telling The Post it would help “reframe the narrative” around immigration and push back against criticism “in the harshest, most forceful way possible.”

But the pattern of misleading clips in their news-style videos amount to more than just minor editing errors, said Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter, now called X. Instead, they suggest that the administration has worked to undercut criticism by pumping out videos that could deceive Americans about the scale or success of their policies, transforming government channels into propaganda tools.

“What we are witnessing is the collapse of government accountability through communication based on facts,” he said. “They’re not trying to communicate actions and outcomes. They’re acting like filmmakers, trying to make people laugh, to make them feel scared, to inspire certain emotions regardless of the truth.”

DHS hasn’t let the criticism slow them down. Officials there have continued to frequently post immigration and protest videos in a newscast-like format, often by including an official criticizing the “fake news hoaxes” of media reporting and explaining why viewers should turn to them for the real truth.

“If you lie or smear our brave men and women of @ICEgov law enforcement, you WILL be debunked,” DHS said in an X post on Sunday. “Watch here for the FACTS.”