Post falsely claims doctored video shows Trump threatening to deport all Ghanaians
- Published on February 11, 2025 at 10:24
- 5 min read
- By Peris GACHAHI, AFP Kenya
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
“I will be depositing all the Ghanaians living in America. America is not your father’s house,” reads a text overlay on a TikTok video posted on February 4, 2025.
The video, shared more than 8,000 times, shows Trump delivering an address from the Oval Office.
“I will be deporting all the Ghanaians living in my country even if you have a green card. America is not your father’s house, and I will make sure Nana Akufo-Addo is arrested for destroying Ghana economy,” he appears to say in the footage.
Akufo-Addo was, until last month, the president of Ghana (archived here). His party ended two terms in office after being battered at the polls in December 2024.
Trump’s immigration crackdown
Trump took the oath of office as US president for the second time on January 20, 2025 (archived here).
One of his central campaign promises was mass deportations of undocumented immigrants (archived here). In just over three weeks back in office, he signed over 50 executive orders, some of them aimed at immigration reform (archived here).
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removal data contained in its annual report for 2024 lists the nationalities and numbers of people deported from the US (archived here).
The report shows 94 Ghanaians were returned home in that year.
Senegal was the top African country with 410 removals, followed by Mauritania with 353 and Nigeria with 138. Other nations on the continent included Angola (119), the Democratic Republic of Congo (96), Guinea (85), Somalia (64), Morocco (49) and Kenya (48).
However, the TikTok video claiming Trump said he would deport all Ghanaians living in America is digitally altered.
Edited video
AFP Fact Check conducted a reverse image search on keyframes from the video to find the original footage.
This led to a televised Trump speech published on the official YouTube channel of CNBC Television on March 12, 2020 (archived here). The clip matches clues in the one shared on TikTok
At the time, Trump, who was serving his first term as president, addressed the nation on the US response to the Covid-19 outbreak after the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic.
In the original video, Trump is wearing the same blue suit and a blue and white striped tie. His hand movements also match those in the TikTok clip.
However, the audios are different.
During the original television broadcast, which lasts more than nine minutes, Trump makes no mention of Ghana or immigration.
Using keywords, we searched for Trump’s addresses from the Oval Office. The only result that matched the visuals in the TikTok clip was the March 2020 coronavirus briefing.
The same address was published by other media outlets and is available on the Trump White House archives YouTube page (archived here, here and here).
We also ran the TikTok video’s audio through InVID-WeVerify's audio detection tool and the results suggested strong evidence of voice cloning.
To date, searches show that Trump has made no official declaration about the deportation of all Ghanaians from the US, although more than 3,000 have been identified for removal, according to official ICE data.
As of November 2024, there were 1,445,549 foreign nationals on the ICE non-detained docket with final orders for removal (archived here).
With 4,090 citizens, Somalia had the largest number of illegal African immigrants on the list, followed by Nigeria with 3,690.
Ghana came in third with 3,228 illegal immigrants earmarked for deportation
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
