A Story About ICE Raiding a School Graduation in LA Made the Rounds But Was Entirely False

I don’t spend much time on Facebook but today I came across a story that an old friend had commented on. I’m not going to link it but basically it was a very emotional post by someone referring to claims that ICE had raided a high school graduation and taken away some poor child’s parents. And what followed was a bunch of dismayed adults who were saying very stern things about the Trump administration and the people who support ICE operations.

Again, I never do this but just this once I decided to look into it, partly because I wanted to know if there was any truth to it and partly because my old friend was one of the people commenting. So after looking around for about 10 minutes, here’s what I found. 

The claim about ICE raiding a graduation really made the rounds last weekend. That’s bad because it meant millions of people were hearing a story that ultimately was not true, but it’s good because it also meant the whole thing had already been fact-checked several times. Here’s Politifact, my least favorite fact checking site.

In an emotional video that quickly went viral, a school worker told of an elementary school immigration raid that forced parents to flee and leave their children behind.

“I can’t handle this y’all,” the man began, wiping tears from his cheeks…

“All of a sudden a bunch of parents have to run out because (ICE) is there,” the man said in his June 6 Instagram post. “Parents had to run out because they don’t have papers and they had to leave their kids because the kids do.” 

The video that started this rumor is literally just a guy sobbing about this terrible incident he just heard about at a nearby school. Some NSFW language here.

That video got 7 million views. It probably convinced tens of thousands of people that ICE was a group of psychopathic monsters. But none of what he described above really happened. The school district superintendent made a point of denying the rumors.

Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said rumors of the Gratt Learning Academy raid were wrong. 

“We’ve investigated it, and all the reports that came back were that no such event happened,” Carvalho said during a June 6 press conference. The school district also disputed the rumor June 10 on Instagram, saying, “These claims are false.”

Here’s the Instagram post from LAUSD: “These claims are false.”

Yesterday, the guy who started all of this posted a follow-up video on Instagram. Instead of apologizing, he got angry with the people fact-checking him. “A lot of you can’t seem to tell the difference between a real, emotional response to information and a news report,” he said. He added, “Tears do not wait for confirmation.”

Um, okay. I get that people have emotional reactions to things, but in this case he wasn’t even there. The information he was reacting to came second hand by phone. Nevertheless, his emotional reaction caused tens of thousands of other people to have an emotional reaction to something that did not happen. 

In the video above he seems to be arguing it was fake but accurate, i.e. scary things are happening even if this one didn’t. He’s clearly more upset at the people saying he’s wrong than he is about being wrong.

I guess this is what happens when everyone from Sen. Padilla, to the local LA news crew to this guy on Instagram are all trying to create content that stirs up emotions. The result is a bunch of angry, worked up people ready to join a protest against ICE even though they don’t know what is actually happening.

Update: Had to remove the final Instagram video because it was breaking the page for some reason. Anyway, you can find it at the link above.