Posts share hoax report Trump ordered 'total border shutdown'
- Published on July 14, 2025 at 05:16
- 3 min read
- By Jan Cuyco, AFP Philippines
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"President Donald Trump order (sic) full borders shut down people may be locked out of the US," reads the caption of a Facebook reel shared on July 3, 2025.
The video appears to show a news report featuring a voiceover that says the US president signed "one of the most extreme executive orders in US history", enacting a "total border shutdown" from July 1 with no set reopening date.
"No one goes in, no one comes out. Not even legal residents with full documentation," it says.
Similar videos were shared elsewhere on Facebook.
"If this is true, it will be the end of tourism in America!" read a comment on one of the posts.
Another said: "This reeks of martial law in America, they're getting strict. I hope this isn't true."
The posts surfaced after Trump revived his first-term travel ban on June 4, barring entry to people from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Libya and Somalia (archived link). The proclamation also covers Burma, Chad, Congo, Eritrea, Haiti, Sudan, Yemen and Equatorial Guinea.
The list results from a January 20 executive order Trump issued requiring the departments of State and Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence to compile a report on "hostile attitudes" towards the United States and whether entry from certain countries represented a national security risk.
Trump issued an executive order during his first term in January 2017 banning travel to the United States by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries -- Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
But as of July 13, there have been no official reports or announcements from either the White House or the US Federal Register announcing a "total border shutdown" (archived here and here).
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to the same clip posted on June 29 by a user who frequently posts misinformation about US politics framed as "breaking news".
Further reverse image searches found the clip of Trump holding up a signed executive order was also posted on CBS News's Instagram on May 20 (archived link).
"President Trump signed a bipartisan bill into law that makes it a federal crime to post real and fake sexually explicit imagery online of people without their consent," reads the video's caption.
An analysis of the audio used in the false posts using the Hiya voice cloning detection tool from The Verification Plug-in (formerly known as InVID-WeVerify) found it was "very likely AI-generated".
AFP has debunked other misinformation related to Trump here.
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