A spokesperson for U.S. Border Patrol has finally issued a statement about the antisemitic social media video that the agency posted in August, but was just deleted this week. And in typical Trumpian fashion, the statement is incredibly whiny.
Border Patrol, which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, first posted a 13-second video to Instagram and Facebook back in August that used audio from the 1995 Michael Jackson song “They Don’t Care About Us.” Specifically, the agency used a portion of the song that includes the slurs “Jew me” and “kike me.”
The song was controversial at the time, and Jackson apologized, releasing a new version of the song and saying he didn’t intend for it to be antisemitic. But, obviously, it’s extremely antisemitic. And anyone in 2025 who would use that audio, especially just that portion of the song for a very short video, knows exactly what they’re doing.
The video and the response
The Border Patrol video was posted months ago but went largely unnoticed by the broader public until Tuesday, when white supremacists on X started to post about it approvingly. The video was even pinned to the Border Patrol’s Reels section when Gizmodo viewed it on Tuesday night, meaning that they really wanted people to see it.
It had racked up 3.4 million views at that point before being deleted. We saved a copy of the video, which you can see below.
Border Patrol deleted the videos from Instagram and Facebook on Wednesday morning, but Gizmodo was unsure whether it was the immigration agency that deleted them or perhaps Meta. After all the attention the video attracted, it seemed plausible that it had been deleted by Facebook moderators for hate speech violations.
Gizmodo reached out to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, as well as DHS on Wednesday morning. Meta gave us the run-around and wouldn’t say who had actually deleted the video. DHS didn’t respond on Wednesday, but finally sent a short email on Thursday afternoon.
“We deleted the post and will update with different music. End of story. Now focus on the violent criminal illegal aliens,” the email read, credited only to an anonymous “CBP Spox.”
If that sounds like an odd tone to be coming from an official government spokesperson, you’d be right. I’ve been a reporter for over a decade, and I’ve never had government officials respond to emails in the way that they have since President Trump took power this past January. And to send that kind of terse and snippy message without acknowledging the antisemitism of the video or why it had been posted in the first place is extremely weird. It’s particularly weird when DHS is sharing fascist propaganda daily, often with racist messages.
But that’s how DHS operates now. Last month, Gizmodo emailed the agency to inquire about a bizarre video that DHS had distributed, which featured video and music from Pokémon. The response: “To arrest them is our real test. To deport them is our cause,” a reference to the Pokémon song. It might have been cutesy fun coming from some shitposter on the internet. But these are the folks who carry guns and deport people to countries where they’ve never lived.
DHS keeps lying
President Donald Trump is currently working to purge the country of immigrants, and his agents don’t seem to care much about telling the truth. People who work for DHS and ICE have frequently been caught lying in recent months. And they always seem to be incredibly whiny in the process.
For example, a video of a teenager being violently arrested in Chicago went viral last week, and most people were horrified. But DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted the video was “from a year ago,” a claim that was being made by far-right accounts on X. McLaughlin also claimed that the people in the video weren’t even ICE. Both claims are lies, as the people who were arrested were reportedly protesting and monitoring ICE, according to the Chicago Tribune.
According to the newspaper: “Prior to being detained, the teenagers had been following the agents’ cars and honking their car horn to warn people that federal agents were patrolling the neighborhood.” The tactic has become common in communities like Los Angeles and Chicago, as people try to warn their neighbors about the masked secret police who now roam our streets.
Is it annoying for the federal agents? Sure. But it’s not illegal, and it’s not grounds for an arrest, violent or otherwise, unless you live in an authoritarian country.
Imagine being so desperate to demonize law enforcement you post a video from a burglary arrest Chicago Police made over a year ago.
This isn’t even ICE. https://t.co/2NhJybMsri
— Tricia McLaughlin (@TriciaOhio) October 12, 2025
Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat who represents the district in Illinois where the incident took place, released a statement confirming the video was recent and noted that “a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security aggressively spread misinformation.” The only thing that appears to be incorrect about the original viral video is the age of one of the people who was arrested. The woman in the video is 18, not 15, according to the Chicago Tribune. But everything else the DHS spokesperson was trying to claim was just nonsense pushed by random right-wing trolls on X.
Why would McLaughlin just blast out misinformation to the world like that? That part is unclear, but she seems to do it a lot. Like when she recently said a 13-year-old arrested by ICE had a gun (he did not) or that a Chicago woman shot by CBP had driven herself to the hospital (she did not).
According to DHS, the woman who was shot by a CBP agent, 30-year-old Marimar Martinez, supposedly rammed her car into the agents, though she says they rammed into her. Oddly, the federal vehicle that was allegedly rammed was later driven over 1,000 miles away to Maine, something that has reportedly frustrated the judge in the case because it makes no sense why the government would do that. That vehicle is evidence in Martinez’s upcoming trial, and any reasonably intelligent person would know that.
What’s more, McLaughlin released a statement shortly after Martinez was arrested, insisting that she was “armed with a semi-automatic weapon” and that an agent acted “defensively” by shooting her. Gizmodo reached out to DHS at the time, asking specifically about the weapon, and the agency didn’t respond, other than to share a link to McLaughlin’s statement. We’ve since learned from news reports that Martinez had a legal concealed carry license for a gun that never left her purse, according to FOX 32.
What should we believe?
All of the lies and shady maneuvers make it very hard for the average person to believe what they’re hearing.
Even when the federal government goes to trial over an incident involving ICE, it seems like the government isn’t giving us the whole picture. On Thursday, a woman in Washington, DC, was acquitted of assaulting an FBI agent during a protest outside the DC Jail back in July. The government tried to bring felony charges three times, and grand juries rejected those charges three times. So when they finally brought lesser charges, it seemed likely that she’d be convicted. But the evidence was so ridiculous, the jury apparently saw right through it.
The FBI agent who claimed she was assaulted, Eugenia Bates, didn’t turn over text messages until the last minute, and one of the messages was missing, according to local news outlet WUSA. In one of the messages, the FBI agent described the defendant as a “libtard.” Incredibly, surveillance footage from a camera that the government had described as inoperable suddenly showed up the night before the trial as well.
To put it bluntly: Americans are now in a position where they really can’t believe anything the federal government says. Whatever you thought of the feds before Trump took power again, there was a general belief among most Americans that agencies like the FBI or DHS would try to tell the truth. Given the road we’re currently going down as a country, with masked men terrorizing hard-working people, it’s not clear why anyone would ever do that again.
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