FAKE EMERGENCIESWhite House’s Video About Supposed “Mess” in Chicago Consists Mostly of Stitched-Together Outdated Video Pieces from Six Other States
The White House released a video which, it claimed, showed unruly and violent conduct by Chicagoans in confrontations with police and ICE gents, thus justifying Trump’s order to send 300 Texas National Guard troops to deal with “the mess” in Chicago. But most of the released video had nothing to do with Chicago: It consisted of stitched-together pieces of video footage from six other states, with some of the video fragments filmed in 2023 and 2024, when Biden was president.
A dramatic voiceover video shared by the White House and President Donald Trump claims to show immigration agents responding to the “mess” in Chicago as the Republican president seeks to justify deploying Texas National Guard troops to the Democrat-run city.
But an AFP investigation found that the video is littered with outdated footage highlighting drug busts, arrests and deportation raids in other states, including Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Nebraska, California, and Arizona.
AFP reports:
The White House and the president shared the video as local leaders and on-the-ground protesters pushed back on the administration’s deployment of National Guard soldiers to the Chicago area — an effort that a federal judge ordered temporarily halted on October 9. Trump, who has branded the Democratic stronghold a “war zone” and called for Johnson and Pritzker to be jailed, has insisted the troops are necessary to support his mass-deportation policies and protect ICE agents whose aggressive raids have roiled the city’s Latino communities and businesses.
But many of the video’s sensational scenes purporting to depict the “mess” in Chicago are outdated and were filmed outside of the city.
The Daily Beast first reported that some of the shots were from April in Florida, a Republican-leaning state home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Some of the videos date to 2024 and 2023, when former president Joe Biden was in office.
AFP notes that several that authentically showed Chicago were from January 2025 — not captured as Trump sought to deploy troops in October.
