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| - A rumor circulating online in January 2025 claimed a photo showed a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent grabbing a crying girl's arm. The blurred background of the picture appeared to show a teacher standing in front of a decorative wall, like those found in school classrooms. The image surfaced in the days following U.S. President Donald Trump's second inauguration, as federal agents began following orders to carry out the new administration's mass migrant-deportation plans. Those plans featured an announcement about allowing arrests in schools and churches.
Users expressed either outrage or agreement with the purported action taken against the girl in the picture. We located posts featuring the photo on Facebook, Imgur, Instagram, Threads, and X. One X user captioned (archived) the image, "Christians ok with this?" That post received over 10 million views.
One Facebook user expressing skepticism about the photo remarked, "I keep seeing this photo but no source is given, no place where it was taken [and] no date. I suspect it is fake."
Indeed, X user @LiveOnTheChat told Snopes the account created the image with Grok, the generative artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's xAI. The user first posted (archived) the picture on Jan. 24.
In private messages on X, @LiveOnTheChat provided us with a screenshot showing four images Grok generated. The text prompt submitted to Grok read, "Generate an image of Police ICE agents aggressively dragging Latino children crying out of a 2nd grade classroom."
The in-question image showed unnatural, shiny artifacts along the bottom part of the picture. Other images displayed "ICE" on clothing with strange-looking letters, which can sometimes stand as one of several potential signs someone generated an image with AI. Also, Grok mistakenly generated two of the pictures depicting children wearing clothing reading "ICE."
The Grok chatbot generated all four of these fake images.
While these photos originated from the AI chatbot, the user who submitted the prompt generated images based on real news regarding Trump's administration.
Trump Allowing Arrests in Schools and Churches
On the first full day of Trump's second term, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would allow federal immigration agents to attempt arrests of migrants at schools and churches. A DHS spokesperson's statement on the department's website read, "Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America's schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense."
On Jan. 28, The Associated Press published ICE agents had crossed over a threshold of 1,000 daily arrests of migrants, after averaging only around 300 just months before under President Joe Biden's administration. "If sustained, those numbers would mark the highest daily average since ICE began keeping records," the reporting read.
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