Fake News: Viral Video Alleging ICE Raid of Elementary School Debunked by LA Times, Politifact
“We’ve investigated it, and all the reports that came back was that no such event happened.”
It seems like just about every day now, we’re seeing stories from news outlets about ICE sweeps that either didn’t happen, or that happened but just not how the mainstream media and the activist left portrayed them.
For instance, KTLA has gotten really bad about leaving the pertinent facts out of their news teasers on stories about ICE immigration enforcement activity in Los Angeles amid the LA riots.
Case in point, this one:
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem attends ICE raid at home of pregnant L.A. County mother https://t.co/YYi8WI8bTR
— KTLA (@KTLA) June 13, 2025
Left out of their promo was this bit of extremely relevant information, courtesy of Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin:
I was at this operation with Noem. It wasn’t targeting a “pregnant mother”, it was targeting her previously deported illegal alien Mexican husband who had been convicted of drug trafficking in February & had an attempted murder charge pleaded down to an assault conviction. ICE had a criminal judicial warrant for his arrest, signed off on by a federal judge, because he illegally re-entered the U.S. after removal, which is a felony.
Of course, none of that context is in @KTLA reporting here as they only spoke to his wife, who apparently *shockingly* didn’t disclose any of his criminal history.
There have been other instances, of course, like the stories of the children who are U.S. citizens being “deported” – only to find out once you read the fine print that it was their illegal immigrant mothers who were being deported and who, according to ICE and DHS, wanted to take their children with them.
It’s hard to know which is more infuriating, though. Those types of deliberately sensationalized stories from the press or the ones from either the media or social media influencers that are made up out of whole cloth.
It is on that note that we turn to a video shared last week by an alleged employee of the Los Angeles County school system. In it, a man is seen crying while alleging, without evidence, that a neighboring elementary school that was holding a graduation ceremony was subjected to an ICE raid, which terrified the students, the family members, and school administrators.
Watch (language warning):
Los Angeles school worker shares frustration over parents having to leave their children’s graduation ceremony because ICE raided an elementary school’s graduation today pic.twitter.com/sMQR1KKAcy
— JaValle (@JaValle) June 7, 2025
The clip was originally shared on the Instagram page of a guy who goes by the username “heymrhowie,” and was also posted to TikTok and Facebook. It went viral, with views in the millions, so much so that it prompted celebrity wacktivists like Eva Longoria to warn of elementary school graduation ceremony raids:
Actress Eva Longoria spreads the false BlueAnon conspiracy theory that ICE is raiding elementary schools
Misinformation like this is fomenting violence across the country! pic.twitter.com/8RCnQLk6P7
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) June 12, 2025
The problem? It was fake news, according to the LA Times of all places, which fact-checked the claim:
On Monday, Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Alberto Carvalho said there was no confirmed threat to the Friday culmination at Gratts Elementary, located just west of downtown.
“We’ve investigated it,” Carvalho said during a news conference, “and all the reports that came back was that no such event happened.”
He added, “What is possible is, considering the level of fear and awareness in our community, if you see three unmarked vehicles, three mini-vans, three SUVs, driving through a neighborhood, obviously you’re going to suspect that that may be a possibility. We believe that that may have been the case.”
🚨This individual went viral for claiming that ICE raided an elementary school graduation ceremony — Causing chaos & causing parents to flee.
The Los Angeles Times debunked the story ENTIRELY.
It never happened. It was a total lie. pic.twitter.com/B58bSmnrzI
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 12, 2025
Politifact fact-checked it, too, referencing the LA Times story as their primary source:
An Instagram post falsely claimed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided Los Angeles' Gratts Learning Academy during a June graduation ceremony. https://t.co/4GX1ikAQbK
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) June 13, 2025
This video had nearly 8 million views claiming ICE was raiding an elementary school’s graduation ceremony.
It was completely made up. https://t.co/KKzGlTw2jJ pic.twitter.com/6YTCUotHmX
— AG (@AGHamilton29) June 11, 2025
This isn’t the first debunked “ICE raid” story, and it won’t be the last, but it does provide a helpful reminder not to believe everything you see claimed on social media.
-Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter/X.-
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Comments
There is so much fake news on the left, that if you tried to debunk it and debunked a thousand fake news stories a day, it would take the next thousand years to skim an inch off the top.
A lie travels halfway around the globe before the truth gets its shoes on.
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You know you are approaching peak leftist overreach when your fake news is immediately debunked by the LA Times.
Anyone surprised a Leftist would lie? These people easily engage in nefarious acts and violence, lying is their actual nature, not truth.
They won’t even care it’s proven false… it will still stand ….as well it has happened or it’s going to so there…
I’m just surprised kids getting out of 6th grade have a graduation.
So now mainstream media are making up dramatic stories to alarm the gullible about fake ICE raids? Shocking! When did this start?
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The gullible idiots being allowed to vote is the scary part
The ideological legacy media actively chooses how they frame a story, especially the headline. The one about the ICE raid on a pregnant woman’s home is a great example of the willful deception. Sure a pregnant woman lived there but her husband (illegal alien with active criminal warrants) was the target not her. If the didn’t put pregnant woman in the headline it isn’t newsworthy. Even with a pregnant woman in the home it isn’t really all that unusual. I would imagine LEO go into homes where a resident is pregnant dozens of times a day across the Nation. They were not ‘reporting’ but rather using a deliberately incomplete story to build and establish another brick in the narrative wall. This might still work on some but for others …we are like the villagers in the story of the boy who cried wolf, we have been lied to so often we ignore it, we’re callously indifferent to even true sob stories.
To answer your question, it started (if you don’t count the 1960 and 70s where people could file false claims of misconduct against police officers and suffer no consequences when the claim was proven false) when people started creating “racist events” against themselves to make the general society look racist and when the truth got revealed they suffered no consequence. The most famous, and earliest recorded, of these is the work product of Al Sharpton and his Tanya Brawly fraud.
The open borders crowd saw what the race hustlers were doing and said “hold my tequila”.
No Kings but plenty of Drama Queens
When your weepy acting job BS doesn’t pass muster with the LA Times, you’re doing it wrong.
The evasive actions of the California police, schools, prisons, etc. are not okay. Teachers and school administrators have no more right to defy the federal government than police officers and prison wardens. This is bull.
Also you’d think the global warming fanatics would be concerned about 20 million extra “Americans” consuming beef, driving SUVs, living in McMansions and producing CO2 recklessly. Close the border and deport to save the earth!!
Is there a reason they shouldn’t be raiding elementary schools or deporting pregnant illegals? They’re here illegally. They need to go.
No different than how Israelis fired on Gazans seeking food assistance.
Predisposed bias, added to the ability to swallow no matter the gruel offered. The meal of a dupe.
It seems to have no bounds and is particularly prevalent among Democratic leadership, often the chefs making the gruel.
Dupes get duped. Who would have imagined?
“a helpful reminder not to believe everything you see claimed on social media.”
Correction: not to believe _anything_…
Can’t tell you how disappointed I am in Trump
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/06/trump-directs-ice-stop-raids-agriculture-hotel-restaurant/
Any particular type of raid is simply not necessary. Don’t raid school graduations and hotels/restaurants? Fine. This free up resources to raid elsewhere. This is just a sop for the gullible Left. They don’t understand how operations like this work. It’s not like the agents who would have raided these places will now be sitting on their hands.
The first issue I have with this is there’s ALREADY an existing set of fairly generous VISA categories SPECIFICALLY for both Hospitality and Agriculture to hire temporary alien workers legally. Literally special industry specific visa exclusively for those two industries. I don’t wanna hear whining about lack of workers. Either use the Visa programs set aside as crony capitalism or raise wages/improve working conditions to attract willing domestic labor.
Secondly where’s the prosecution of the these Employers who hired illegal aliens? Why should some small business that did the right thing, followed the rules but got driven out business by the illegal practices of their competition be the only ones harmed? What about the act these employers benefited while using cheaper labor of illegal aliens, many exploited, ‘I’ll call La Migra if you complain’ while refusing to hire domestic labor at a wage and benefits level to attract willing domestic labor?
Again, Chief, why do you spell “visa” as if it were the brand name of a credit card, rather than a normal English word?
Primarily b/c I can and folks still understand the meaning, even if it triggers them in some way. Secondly to draw attention and focus the reader via ALL capitalization… the same way I did for ‘SPECIFICALLY’ to which you didn’t object. Why are you so pedantic on a comment board? What possible value does it bring to the discourse about the issue(s) at hand?
Frankly I’ve come to view objections to FORM v SUBSTANCE in a discussion as a passive aggressive, underhanded tactic to sidestep the main issue and redirect the debate by those who employ this tactic b/c they don’t have a worthwhile or convincing counter argument to rebut the main thrust of the argument they are being pernickety towards.
Two things: An employer is not expected to be an expert in identifying fake ID. One of the big myths about illegal immigrants is that they’re “undocumented”. Most of them are very well documented; they have more documents than most legal residents. The only problem is that their documents are not real, or not theirs. But an employer doesn’t know that; if he’s not an idiot he’ll know that some of his employees’ documents are invalid, but not which ones, and it’s just not his business to inquire into them. E-verify is not reliable, and it’s also not mandatory, so why should any given employer use it?
Second thing: Recently I spent some time working on a dairy farm (in an office job, not shoveling cow dung). The farm manager informed me that they had tried and tried to hire Americans to work with the cows, offering well above minimum wage, but it was impossible to find anyone willing to do the work. The few who accepted the job would show up one morning, and as soon as they understood what it involved they would leave. So they employ Guatemalans, and don’t inquire too closely into the validity of their paperwork.
E verify has some utility as is. It can definitely be improved by inclusion of previously withheld data into a database comprised of NICS data, SS# data, State ID, Passport data, IRS data and property tax data. Could probably add in purchased data from utility companies.
E verify should absolutely be made mandatory and 100% cost.free for the public at large to send in a name and SS# and get back three responses; Citizen Y/N, Lawful presence in USA Y/N, permitted to lawfully be employed Y/N.
Farmers can use automation/robotics and several field crops not currently using automation/equipment v hand picking would move to it if incentives aligned. They can also raise wages to attract and retain labor ..just like every other employer does.
Final piece of the puzzle is the elimination of ALL Federal assistance of any kind for able bodied adults. They can get a.job to support themselves, their families can willingly take.them in to.support them, a charity can provide for them …or they can choose not to work, not to receive wages, not have funds to by food or shelter and starve in a ditch.
Same approach should apply for ‘unemployment’. Require a physical visit to an unemployment office, do a skills assessment, fix their resume offer leads. Limit receipt unemployment benefits to 90 days..That gives the individual 90 days to find employment of their choice on their terms. After 90 days they get assigned to a job for which matches their skill set. Take it or leave.it basis b/c if they decline they lose all benefits and can figure it out on their own but without Uncle Sugar subsidies.
Somewhat but the Administration has made it clear they are going after the criminals first so it’s not unexpected. If they apprehend an illegal alien who has committed criminal acts other than entering the country illegally and other illegal aliens are there then they are pulling them in too but they are not the focus right now. You have to eat an elephant one bite at a time.
The lying by the leftist media has gotten so bad that the only stories you can trust as actually being true are the ones they falsely label “misinformation” and “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories”.