Video shows 27-year-old detained by police, not child arrested by ICEpublished at 13:41 BST
13:41 BST
Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist
Image source, X
We’ve been looking into a viral video supposedly showing “a 6-year-old immigrant child” being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as part of US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
One version gathered more than six million views on X over the weekend, but the claim of what it shows is false.
This video was taken on 1 April and is actually of a 27-year-old woman being detained for jaywalking – an offence of illegally crossing a road, according to Clark County Sheriff’s Office in Washington state.
Officers spotted the woman running across a busy junction and mistakenly thought she was a child, they said in a Facebook post.
The woman was briefly detained after she provided a name which did not return any records, the sheriff said. She was released with a verbal warning after her identity was confirmed.
Dashcam images timestamped to the evening of 1 April and published by the sheriff’s office show the woman, who is of short statute, crossing the road.
But her detention was also filmed by a bystander who published the video on YouTube. This video has then been misleadingly clipped and posted by X users this weekend. The words Clark County Sheriff are clearly visible on the side of the police vehicle in the video, showing it was not ICE agents.
US media have reported multiple cases of children being detained by federal law enforcement since the beginning of Trump’s latest crackdown on illegal immigration.
Image source, Clark County Sheriff’s Office