5 days ago
Outdated footage of kneeling officers misrepresented as immigration protests
"Here is Omaha PD kneeling for illegal immigrants. Unbelievable," says a July 16, 2025 post on Gettr, a platform catering to American conservatives.
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Screenshot from Gettr taken July 17, 2025
Another post on X adds: "Thank God for ICE and our federal agents."
The video shows a line of uniformed police officers kneeling and raising their fists in the air in front of a crowd of protesters, before standing to offer handshakes and hugs.
Similar posts spread the same clip in June 2025, as demonstrations against deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flared in cities across the country, with Los Angeles taking center stage following Trump's deployment of National Guard and US military troops to the Democratic stronghold.
ICE has scaled up deportation efforts under the Republican president, who made expelling undocumented immigrants a key priority for his second White House term. Dramatic images have shown federal agents, often masked and sometimes armed with assault rifles, chasing down migrants at courthouses, farms and on the streets.
The video claimed to show Omaha law enforcement taking a knee is old and unrelated to illegal immigration, however.
Reverse image searches revealed that the Omaha Police Department shared the footage June 2, 2020 (archived here).
At the time, racial justice protesters were rallying across the country following the murder of Floyd, who died at the hands of a white police officer during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Officer Michael Pecha, a spokesperson with the Omaha Police Department's public information office, confirmed to AFP that the clip is "from protests in 2020."
"We have not had any large-scale protests in Omaha recently," Pecha said in a July 17, 2025 email.
Pecha referred AFP to a 2020 civil unrest report, which explained that the department uploaded the footage to debunk online claims that an officer had performed a Nazi salute (archived here).
"In an effort to diffuse tensions near 13th and Howard, a group of officers and National Guard members kneeled with the protesters," it reads.
The report said the incident took place June 1, 2020.
Another video posted to TikTok at the time shows the moment from a different angle (archived here).
The act of kneeling has become associated with advocacy against racism and police brutality in the United States, largely inspired by former National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who began taking a knee during pre-game performances of the US national anthem in 2016.
The mischaracterization of the Omaha video comes just over a month after Police Chief Todd Schmaderer warned Nebraskans to look out for misinformation in response to a fake post that purported to show the department advising residents of future ICE raids (archived here, and here).
AFP previously debunked social media posts falsely claiming a video of a Los Angeles Police Department officer kneeling had taken place during June 2025 protests against Trump's policies. In reality, the clip was also from 2020.
AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about US politics here.
