Old video from Moscow misrepresented as New York ICE protest
- Published on December 30, 2025 at 17:06
- 2 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
A video spreading across platforms claims to show anti-deportation protesters in New York City pelting immigration agents with snowballs, but the footage is misrepresented. It was captured in Moscow in 2021 as Russians took to the streets following the imprisonment of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
"WATCH: New Yorkers throw snowballs at ICE agents," says a December 28, 2025 post on X from Spencer Hakimian, a hedge fund manager in New York.
The clip shows a crowd of protesters raining snowballs on law enforcement agents wearing riot gear.
Similar posts spread across X and other platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok and LinkedIn. The video also circulated in Spanish.
Protests against Donald Trump's mass deportation policies have been frequent since his return to the White House, particularly in Democrat-run cities where the president has deployed troops to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an unprecedented use of the military on American soil.
But the video of demonstrators hurling snowballs was captured years before Trump's second term -- and on the other side of the world from New York.
Reverse image searches traced the footage to the Russian media outlet Mediazona, which posted it to X and Telegram on January 23, 2021 (archived here and here). The outlet placed the incident in Moscow and, in a linked report, described it as part of a wave of protests in support of Navalny (archived here).
The clip was widely republished by non-Russian media, including the Guardian (archived here).
Police arrested more than 1,800 protesters across the country that day as Russians denounced Kremlin rule and demanded the release of Navalny, who was detained days earlier on arrival from Germany, where he had been recovering from a near-fatal poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent.
AFP reports and video footage from the mass protests similarly documented how attendees threw snowballs at heavily armed police in Moscow.
AFP geolocated the footage to a stretch of Tsvetnoy Boulevard by matching the park, fence and building in the clip to Google Street View imagery showing the same landmarks (archived here and here).
Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin's foremost critic for years, died in 2024 under mysterious circumstances while serving a 19-year prison sentence on a string of charges widely seen as retribution for his opposition.
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