A new investigation by The Washington Post reveals that many of the promotional clips the Department of Homeland Security posts on social media to boast about its operations quelling lawlessness and protests are, in fact, from months ago or in completely different cities than the actions they mention.
In an egregious example, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee noted, "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'" — but in fact, the footage was from totally unrelated operations from Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Florida.
Meanwhile, the report noted, as the narrator was discussing deportations from D.C., it "played over a clip from May showing detainees on a Coast Guard boat off the coast of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island 400 miles away."
This was not an isolated issue, the report said. DHS posts frequently included misleading and unrelated footage.
"Some videos that purported to show the fiery chaos of Trump-targeted cities included footage from completely different states," said the report, including footage of supposed "antifa terrorists" in Portland, Oregon, that actually showed protesters near Chicago. Even more damning, "One that claimed to show dramatic examples of past administrations’ failures instead featured border crossings and smuggling boats recorded during Trump’s first term."
Abigail Jackson, who works in communications at the White House, did not dispute these misleading edits when asked by the Post, 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.”
This comes after a number of other controversies with DHS social media posts, including one video that compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to catching Pokémon.