At first glance, the scuffle in the video seems shocking. A New York City school principal, waving a bat, stops masked ICE agents from trying to enter the building, and instead of violence, the encounter erupts with cheers from onlookers. “Let me show you why they call me bat girl,” she says to them. In other clips like it, a server flings a bowl of hot noodles at two officers dining at a Chinese restaurant, and a shop owner flexes her Fourth Amendment rights. None of the encounters end in bloodshed.
The videos, equal parts tense and bombastic, are also clearly AI-generated. They are part of a constellation of anti-ICE AI content that is spreading across social media as the federal occupation of Minneapolis—part of the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants—has resulted in agents killing two US citizens in January. Both Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old US Department of Veterans Affairs ICU nurse, were unarmed when they were fatally shot by government officials.
In America, the role of fantasy—the act of imagining a better world and putting action behind it to make it true—is paramount during times of political unrest. The videos, which have millions of views on Facebook and Instagram, offer a blend of revisionist justice that imagines a digital multiverse where the ICE agents are just like us: not above the rule of law.
In the aggregate, anti-ICE AI videos are a way for people to push against the distortions painted by the Trump administration and MAGA influencers to justify their actions, says AI creator Nicholas Arter. “Over the last decade, social media served that role by giving a voice to people who lacked access to traditional media. It’s not surprising that with AI, another major technological shift, we’re seeing similar patterns repeat, with people using the tools available to articulate emotions, fears, or resistance.” But while they might feel cathartic, the videos themselves are also a type of distortion. That can have consequences, whether bolstering the narrative that people of color are agitators, or making the public more skeptical of actual video evidence.
An account going by the name Mike Wayne, whose owner declined multiple requests for comment, appears to be one of the genre’s most prolific posters. The account has uploaded more than 1,000 videos, often of people of color fighting off ICE agents, to his Instagram and Facebook pages since Good was shot on January 7. Tonally, the clips read like digital counternarratives: a clip of ICE agents taking a perp walk, a Latina woman slapping an officer, or a priest pushing masked officials from the doors of his church, announcing, “I don’t know what god you worship, maybe an orange one, but my god is love.” (In reality, federal agents arrested roughly 100 clergy members last week during a protest at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport, where faith leaders said an estimated 2,000 people had been deported from.)
The videos create an alternative timeline, where the passion and anger of Americans resisting the federal occupation of their cities doesn’t cost lives—and accountability actually matters. One of Wayne’s most-watched clips is of an ICE agent fighting white tailgaters at a sporting event, a vision seemingly so surreal it has been viewed 11 million times in less than 72 hours. “Down with fascism,” one person says in the background. Humor also plays an important role in these fan-fiction-style videos. In a clip posted by the meme account RealStrangeAI, four drag queens in neon wigs chase ICE officers through a Saint Paul neighborhood.