Clip makes unfounded claims of mass arrests in Denver

"Denver Police At Airport Off The Record 'The media will not tell you this... The Denver Police in Denver has arrested over 50 al Qaeda members in the last 2 months,'" says a February 4, 2024 post on X, formerly Twitter.

The post from Wall Street Apes, an account AFP has previously fact-checked for spreading misinformation, shares a clip of a man claiming a Denver police officer told him about the arrests at the airport.

"We were talking about the crime that's going on, not only in Denver, but our country," he says in the video, which accumulated more than 20,000 likes on X. "We started talking about all the migrants that have been coming over the border and how they're cutting the police budget in all major cities, including Denver."

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Screenshot of a post on X taken February 20, 2024

Similar claims have circulated on Facebook and TikTok.

A wave of crossings at the US-Mexico border has made migration a key talking point in the US presidential election, with frontrunner Donald Trump and other Republicans seeking to pin blame on President Joe Biden.

The Denver Police Department directed AFP to a statement published the same day as the X post.

"The claim that Denver Police have arrested more than 50 Al-Queda (sic) members in the last two months is false," the department said on X (archived here).

Denver police said in a follow-up post (archived here) that "two federal cases involving arrests at the airport in 2023 were publicized by the U.S Attorney’s Office District of Colorado," linking to press releases from July and December 2023 -- neither of which mentions Al-Qaeda.

In the first case (archived here), an 18-year-old man was charged with attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State group in Iraq. The second (archived here) has to do with a different Colorado man who was arrested at the airport while allegedly traveling to serve as an IS fighter in either Afghanistan or Syria.

AFP did not find any credible media reports of 50 recent Al-Qaeda arrests in Denver.

There is also no mention of such apprehensions on the websites of the US Attorney's Office for the District of Colorado, the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

AFP contacted DHS for comment, but a response was not forthcoming.

AFP has debunked other claims about border security here.