Image of ICE agent, crying child is AI-generated
- Published on January 30, 2025 at 17:18
- 4 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
"If this is your idea of what makes America 'great' then you are broken and we will never have common ground," says a January 25, 2025 post on Threads, in a reference to Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan.
The picture shows a young girl screaming as a man, seemingly wearing a US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) jacket, grabs her arm.
Similar posts sharing the image rocketed across Threads and platforms such as X, Facebook and Instagram, amplified by former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson and American author John Pavlovitz.
Some posts lambasted conservative Christians who support Trump. Others suggested the image was taken inside a school in Chicago, Illinois.
The posts come as immigration authorities in the early days of Trump's second presidency have conducted sweeping raids in Chicago and other US cities following the White House's declaration of a national emergency at the country's southern border with Mexico.
The administration moved quickly after Trump's January 20 inauguration to scale up deportations, including by relaxing rules governing enforcement actions at locations such as schools, churches and workplaces.
But the image claiming to show a crying child being taken into ICE custody is fake.
Reverse image searches revealed it was first posted January 24 in replies to other users on X by "@LiveOnTheChat," the host of a YouTube show.
Reached by AFP, the user said that he created the image using Grok, the AI chatbot affiliated with X, after seeing news articles about a Chicago school district that reported ICE agents at one of its schools -- an alarm that, it turned out, was erroneous.
"I generated the image on Grok to visualize what that experience would be like for a child," @LiveOnTheChat told AFP in a January 29 X direct message. "I shared it on X and was not expecting the image to spread like wildfire, but it did."
He said he believed people were sharing it because they feel "anxious and disturbed" about the prospect of immigration authorities raiding schools.
@LiveOnTheChat provided AFP the original image produced by Grok, which has a Grok watermark in the lower right corner of the frame.
He cropped the version he shared online because "Grok is not perfect" and the full image included deformities on another child's face, he said.
He also sent AFP a screenshot of the prompt he used to spur Grok to create the image, plus three others: "Generate an image of Police ICE agents aggressively dragging latino children crying out of a 2nd grade classroom."
Hany Farid, a media forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley and the co-founder of GetReal Labs, a cybersecurity company focused on preventing malicious AI threats, analyzed the image and confirmed it was an AI-generated fake (archived here).
“Our models trained to distinguish natural from AI-generated images flags this image as synthesized,” Farid said.
Farid noted that the image contains signs it was created using AI, including anomalies around the girl’s shoulder and with the pattern across the bottom.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about migration here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
