White House Confirms It Altered Photo Of Activist Arrested In Minneapolis

The White House has confirmed that an image shared on social media was digitally altered, making it seem as if a prominent community leader and activist in Minnesota was crying during her arrest when in fact, she was not.

CNN’s resident fact-checker, Daniel Dale, confirmed the image–posted to the official White House account on X–was altered to “wrongly make it seem like the defendant was sobbing.” The post has not been removed, and remains online along with a series of posts about protesters and others arrested amid protests in Minnesota. Users of X have, however, amended a community note to the post describing the image as digitally altered content.

The woman in the photo, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is an attorney and social justice activist, and she has been a harsh critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis in the wake of the killing of Renee Good.

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Levy Armstrong was one of three people arrested Thursday after they participated in an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a Minnesota church. Asked for comment, the White House sent a link to a spokesperson’s X post that said, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”

While many social media users quickly called out the White House image as a fake, the real image was shared by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a post on X that was published 30 minutes before the White House shared its altered photo.

The White House’s official social media channels have traditionally featured sedate photos of the president and members of the administration at photo ops and signing ceremonies, but that has changed dramatically in Donald Trump’s second term, where official government accounts have adopted the president’s style of writing insults in all caps, sharing AI-generated videos, and trolling the president’s critics.

It remains unclear who made the digital edits to the photo to make it appear that Levy Armstrong was sobbing, and what the sharing of official statements by the government featuring bogus images might mean for any prosecution.

It’s not the first time an image shared by the Trump White House has led to questions about whether the photo was genuine or not. Three weeks ago, the official White House account on X shared a post from the president that was captioned “Nicolas Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima,” which appeared to show the captured Venezuelan president in a sweatsuit with his eyes and ears covered.

The photo was questioned amid a flood of “deepfake” images that purported to show Maduro in US custody in the hours after his arrest. “This was the first time I’d personally seen so many A.I.-generated images of what was supposed to be a real moment in time,” said Roberta Braga, the executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, in an interview with The New York Times.

In the aftermath of Levy Armstrong’s arrest, anti-ICE protesters held a news conference, with one protester saying “we are not afraid of you, Trump.” Activists plan widespread protests against the presence of ICE in their community on Friday.