Are videos of New York Police officers arresting or threatening to arrest ICE agents on the streets and in the subways of New York real? No, that's not true: A series of videos portraying confrontations between NYPD and ICE officers were created by OpenAI's SORA artificial intelligence app. Many of them can be traced to one content creator who posted them on TikTok and Instagram before they were copied and spread across other social platforms. Many of the original versions included the SORA label that indicates their origin.
One example copied from the original is a video (archived here) published on Instagram on December 6, 2025, with an onscreen caption that read:
New York showing how it's done.
This is what the first frame of the video looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Bluesky)
The video includes two scenes involving purported clashes between New York Police officers and ICE agents. The first 14 seconds show an NYPD officer with A. Hernandez written above his right breast pocket. An ICE agent is seen standing next to him. The NYPD officer said:
I'm NYPD, you hear me? Badge right here. What you doing is illegal. No, you back up. I got authority on this block, just like you think you do. You can't snatch people off the street without a warrant. And I'm telling you right now, federal or not, it's against the law. I'm an officer of the law, too. You put hands on me (inaudible).
The second scene is 10 seconds of NYPD officers with two handcuffed ICE agents in a subway station platform.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Bluesky)
Visual signs that the video is AI-generated media include the garbled text on the patch on the NYPD officer's right shoulder.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Instagram)
A search for the origins of this video led to the @mikewaynedotcom Instagram account.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Instagram)
The first scene of the video was originally posted (archived here) on that account on December 4, 2025.
There is also an @mikewaynedotcom TikTok account where we found many other examples of AI-generated videos of NYPD officers confronting and arresting ICE agents.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of TikTok)
Several of these videos included the Sora logo, which indicates they were created with OpenAI's Sora tools.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of TikTok)
Mike Wayne has at least two Sora accounts, including this one that hosts similar videos.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Sora)
Sora's ability to create realistic videos from text prompts at a low cost has helped fuel an explosion in fake videos that spread misinformation on social platforms. Even if the original creator includes a disclosure that a video is AI-generated and the video has the Sora logo on it, other accounts that share copies of the video often do not retain that information.
