An October 29, 2025 analysis by the Washington Post found that videos the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been posting on social media to brag about the successes of its recent immigration operations actually use footage that is months old or that was recorded thousands of miles away from the locations where it claims the videos were taken.
In one example, DHS shared a video on social media that claimed to show federal agents working to “deport vicious criminals” from Washington, D.C., but the video was actually filmed on Nantucket island in Massachusetts. In another example, freelance journalist Ford Fischer spotted a DHS video on “X” that bore a message indicating it showed “antifa terrorists” storming federal facilities in Portland, Oregon. But Fischer recognized the footage because he’d captured it himself outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, just a few days earlier. DHS had cropped the video to remove Fischer’s watermark.
In addition to misleading viewers about the locations of ICE operations, DHS also uses incorrect dates. DHS shared a video that they claimed showed New York, and referred to the “illegal criminals who flooded our communities” when the country had open borders. But the video was actually filmed in international waters in 2019, during President Donald Trump’s first presidency.
The White House itself has done the same thing DHS has been doing. It posted a video on October 8 that claimed “Chicago is in chaos, and the American people are paying the price.” But the video used recycled footage from an ICE operation that actually took place in Florida months before, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Another White House video shared on October 8 claimed again to show “Chicago in chaos,” but the video was actually taken in Uvalde, Texas.
DHS has also been using footage taken by journalists for other publications without asking permission, and has doctored footage to add graffiti that contains curse words in Spanish in the foreground or background.
The Post article said that,
“…[T]he pattern of misleading clips in [the Trump administration’s] 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.””
For its the analysis, the Post used “reverse-image searches, geolocation tools and other techniques to find the clips’ original sources, [and] found that stretches of the footage had been filmed in different places or times than DHS had presented.”
The President loves to lie. He even lies about what time it is. I, for one, am sick of it. Sure, he’s a loving family man, a public servant who always puts others first, but this habit of his…this lying, it’s worst even, than his “taking liberties” with females, some of whom are quite young. NO MORE GOP FOR ME. And I mean it!