A dramatic voiceover video shared by the White House and US President Donald Trump claims to show immigration agents responding to the "mess" in Chicago as the Republican seeks to justify deploying 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 But an AFP investigation found that the video is littered with outdated footage highlighting drug busts, arrests and deportation raids in other states, including Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Nebraska.
"An incompetent Mayor," the White House's official X account captioned the October 8, 2025 post. "A delusional Governor. Chicago is in chaos, and the American people are paying the price. Chicago doesn't need political spin -- it needs HELP."
Trump later shared the video on his Truth Social platform.
The video opens with images of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker as text flares across the screen: "Illegal criminal aliens, cartels, and gangs are poisoning our kids."
As the clip flashes between cinematic shots of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Homeland Security agents knocking down doors, chasing down deportation targets and carrying out arrests, Trump's voice plays in the background, his words summarized into subtitles at the bottom of the screen.
"Chicago's a mess," the president says. "You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent. We have a governor that refuses to admit he has problems. Everybody knows how bad it is. This open-borders nightmare flooded our country with fentanyl and with people that shouldn't be here. Some of the worst people on Earth. And illicit drugs decimated American communities and left us with the largest law enforcement challenge in our country's history."
"They need help badly," he continues. "Chicago desperately needs help. We don't want to lose Chicago. We're going to lose Chicago. We want to save these places. We're not going to allow this kind of savagery to destroy our society anymore. We're stopping it. Doing it one by one."
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 (archived here).
An AFP investigation, based on reverse image searches and a review of the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service's (DVIDS) video archive, has revealed that the White House's video lifted numerous additional shots from footage of immigration-enforcement operations in California, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina and Nebraska. Some of the videos date to 2024 and 2023, when former president Joe Biden was in office.
While AFP could not verify every clip in the video, several that authentically showed Chicago were from January 2025 -- not captured as Trump sought to deploy troops in October.
AFP contacted the White House for comment, but no response was forthcoming.
Florida
The White House's video lifted heavily from April 2025 footage on the DVIDS website depicting ICE agents making arrests in Miami as part of "Operation Tidal Wave," a statewide push to increase arrests in Florida (archived here and here).CONTINUED:
