Bricks from Malaysia and New Jersey misrepresented amid LA unrest
- Published on June 11, 2025 at 22:54
- 5 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"Soros funded organizations have ordered countless pallets of bricks to be placed near ICE facilities to be used by Democrat militants against ICE," says a June 7, 2025 Facebook post from David Harris Jr, a commentator supportive of US President Donald Trump whom AFP has previously fact-checked for spreading misinformation.
The post references George Soros, a billionaire Democratic megadonor commonly targeted by right-wing and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
In another post shared June 8 on X, American actor James Woods, who has also repeatedly peddled misinformation, shared a photo of a different stack of masonry.
"It’s not like these 'protests' are organized though…," he wrote.
Similar claims citing either of the two images of bricks rocketed across social media platforms amid protests in Los Angeles that broke out June 6, triggered by immigration raids and arrests of what federal authorities say are undocumented migrants and gang members.
Los Angeles officials have said the demonstrations were in large part peaceful but punctuated by scattered violence, including moments during which participants torched cars and law enforcement fired tear gas.
The unrest continued to escalate over several days, with Trump clashing with California leaders as he bypassed the governor to deploy the state's National Guard to the city -- and active-duty US Marines. Other protests have also spread elsewhere in the country.
Local news outlets have reported that some of the protesters in Los Angeles have thrown objects at officers and police cruisers, including rocks and fireworks.
But the two widely shared photos showing stacks of bricks are unrelated.
Malaysian hardware dealer
Reverse image searches traced the first image to a Malaysian hardware and construction dealer's page on Building Materials Online, a Malaysian online marketplace (archived here and here).
The distributor, Ng Lian Seng Hardware Trading, is based in the town of Jinjang, northwest of Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Reached by AFP, a worker at the dealer said the store took the picture and uploaded it to Build Materials Online more than eight years ago.
Google Street View imagery appears to show matching pallets of bricks piled up at the location (archived here).
New Jersey construction
The second photo can be geolocated using Google Street View to West New York, New Jersey (archived here).
A journalist with the fact-checking website Lead Stories visited the location June 9 and photographed additional construction equipment they found stationed beside the same heap of bricks (archived here). They also observed scaffolding set up along a nearby building, where contractors appeared to be working on the exterior.
A well-worn narrative
Fearmongering narratives about piles of bricks have become a common trope among accounts that traffic in misinformation since the nationwide protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, when images from construction sites were misrepresented in posts claiming authorities or left-wing groups were stashing bricks near planned demonstrations to foment violence.
Similar claims have resurfaced around prominent court trials, trucker convoys and the 2024 Democratic National Convention, where protesters demonstrated against Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza.
"These days, it feels like every time there's a protest, the old clickbaity 'pallets of bricks' hoax shows up right on cue," said the Social Media Lab, a research center at Toronto Metropolitan University, in a June 9 post on Bluesky (archived here and here). "You know the one, photos or videos of bricks supposedly left out to encourage rioting. It's catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters," it added.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the Los Angeles protests here, here and here.
Raevathi Supramaniam contributed to this report.
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