At first glance, The scuffle in the video looks shocking. Instead of violence, the clash erupted into cheers from onlookers as a New York City school principal, swinging a baseball bat, blocked an undercover ICE agent from entering his building. “Let me tell you why they call me Batgirl,” she tells them. Other similar clips show an employee throwing a bowl of hot noodles at two police officers dining at a Chinese restaurant, and a restaurant owner violating his Fourth Amendment rights. No encounter ends in bloodshed.
This video is equal parts tense and bombastic, and clearly generated by AI. These are part of a wave of anti-ICE AI content circulating on social media after the federal occupation of Minneapolis, part of the Trump administration’s immigration offensive, resulted in operatives killing two Americans in January. Renee Nicole Good, 37, a mother of three, and Alex Preti, 37, an ICU nurse with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, were unarmed when they were shot and killed by government officials.
In America, the role of fantasy, the act of imagining a better world and taking action to make it a reality, is paramount during times of political unrest. The video, which has millions of views on Facebook and Instagram, offers a revisionist amalgamation of justice that imagines a digitally pluralistic world in which ICE officers are just like the rest of us and not above the law.
Overall, the anti-ICE AI video is a way for people to speak out against the distortions portrayed by the Trump administration and MAGA influencers to justify their actions, says AI creator Nicholas Arter. “For the past decade, social media has played its part by giving a voice to those who don’t have access to traditional media. With AI, another major technological innovation, it’s no surprise to see similar patterns repeat themselves, as people use the tools available to them to articulate their emotions, fears, and resistance.” But while the video itself may feel cathartic, it’s also a kind of distortion. That could have the effect of reinforcing the theory that people of color were the instigators and increasing public skepticism about the actual video evidence.
An account named Mike Wayne, whose owner declined multiple requests for comment, appears to be one of the most prolific posters in the genre. Since Goode was shot on January 7, the account has uploaded more than 1,000 videos to its Instagram and Facebook pages, many of them showing people of color fighting ICE agents. Tone-wise, the clip read like a digital rebuttal. There’s a clip of a police officer walking, a Latina woman slapping a police officer, or a priest pushing a masked employee through a church door declaring, “I don’t know what God you worship, maybe an orange God, but my God is love.” (In fact, federal agents arrested about 100 clergy last week during protests at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, while religious leaders said an estimated 2,000 were deported.)
This video creates an alternate timeline, where the passion and anger of Americans resisting the federal government’s occupation of their cities does not come at the cost of their lives, but where responsibility actually matters. One of Wayne’s most-watched clips, of ICE agents fighting a white reckless driver at a sporting event, is so surreal that it was viewed 11 million times in less than 72 hours. “Fascism is overthrown,” someone says in the background. Humor also plays an important role in these fan fiction style videos. In a clip posted by meme account RealStrangeAI, four drag queens wearing neon wigs chase an ICE officer through the St. Paul area.
