Did a video show "over 1,000" migrants entering the United States through the southern border shortly after President Donald Trump's second inauguration? No, that's not true: This video was posted on X in March 2023, a reverse image search showed. An online news search did not yield any evidence that the events in this video took place in January 2025.
The claim appeared in a post on X (archived here) on January 21, 2025. The caption read:
👀🚨BREAKING: Over 1,000 migrants broke through a Mexican blockade & are now headed to the U.S. Southern Border
Trump is already deploying resources to the border.
This is an INVASION & needs to be treated as such.
They are about to FAFO & I'm here for it.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Jan 22 15:27:17 2025 UTC)
The post included a video of border patrol officers trying and failing to keep a crowd from advancing. The creator of this post offered no evidence that this was video was taken in January 2025.
A reverse image search (archived here) of a still from the video in the claim led to this post on X from March 2023. The 2023 post included the same video as in the claim. The caption, translated by Lead Stories, read:
Crisis on the US border: Hundreds of Venezuelan migrants entered by force through the border crossing between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Texas (Video) https://bit.ly/3lbEhZF
A Google News search of keywords relating to the claim did not yield any articles that would confirm the claim (archived here).
Lead Stories has contacted the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency about the accuracy of the assertions in the claim. We will update this article when a relevant response is received.
More Lead Stories fact checks of claims concerning immigration into the United States can be found here.
