Burning Waymo taxi clip misrepresented after ICE-involved shooting
- Published on January 14, 2026 at 22:39
- 4 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
As Americans rally in cities across the country following the fatal shooting of a Minnesota woman by a US immigration agent, a video of Waymo taxis engulfed in flames is spreading online in posts claiming it shows demonstrations against Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies. But the footage is misrepresented; it traces to June 2025 in Los Angeles, when similar protests sprung up as the president deployed National Guard troops to the city.
"The American Spring is coming…The people don't want to vote Trump out. They want to bring him down. Silence is over. Rage is speaking," says a January 12, 2026 post sharing the clip on X.
The post comes from "@SilentlySirs," an account AFP previously fact-checked for spreading other misinformation about the protests that have occurred across the United States after the fatal January 7 shooting in Minneapolis by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. According to X, the account is based in Africa.
Similar posts spread in multiple languages, including Spanish and French, and across platforms. Some specifically claimed the video was captured in Minneapolis in January.
But the footage predates the ICE-involved shooting by several months.
Reverse image searches uncovered the same video in TikTok and Instagram posts dating to June 9, 2025 that placed it in Los Angeles (archived here and here). AFP corroborated the location by geolocating the footage to the intersection of Los Angeles Street and Arcadia Street, near the Garnier Building, based on a street sign that is briefly visible in the clip (archived here).
In a January 14, 2026 direct message on Instagram, the original poster, Gabriel Sandoval, told AFP that he recorded the footage himself during anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.
"All those accounts stole my video," he said. "That is in Los Angeles."
He shared a screenshot of the video from his iPhone confirming that he filmed it on June 8, 2025.
Demonstrators torched and graffitied several autonomous Waymo taxis that day as they took over downtown streets in objection to immigration raids and Trump's mobilization of National Guard troops to the California city.
AFP photos and videos show similar scenes, as well as the aftermath of the burned vehicles.
Trump went on to deploy soldiers to several other cities, including Chicago and Portland, in an unprecedented use of the American military on US soil, before a series of legal setbacks led him to withdraw the forces from some of them in December 2025.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about the ICE-involved shooting in Minnesota, including here, here, here and here.
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