Beware claim ICE arrested civil rights attorney Sandra May Watkins

In early February 2026, a rumor spread online that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a civil rights attorney named Sandra May Watkins in her driveway.

According to the rumor, Watkins then revealed that she had been recording her wrongful arrest, leading to the officers’ arrests and convictions. 

The claim primarily circulated on Facebook (screenshotted). Snopes readers also asked us to verify the story. 

This rumor appeared to have originated with the Facebook account shown above, “Stories point,” whose page stated, “We post fictional stories” (screenshotted). 

The story also contained numerous signs that it was generated using artificial intelligence (AI). Furthermore, a Google search returned no results for reputable news organizations reporting on such an incident, which would almost certainly have happened if it were true.

As such, we have rated this claim false. 

How we know the story is AI slop

One of the biggest inconsistencies in the story is the name of the arrested woman. She is said to have first identified herself as “Congresswoman Ela Harris” before the story states that her name is “Sandra May Watkins.”

There was no U.S. congresswoman named Ela Harris as of this writing. Furthermore, a search for “Sandra May Watkins civil rights attorney” returned no relevant results. If Watkins were a prominent civil rights attorney, as stated in the story, she would likely have an online presence, such as an “about” page with her law firm. 

The story also claimed that the FBI arrested an agent identified as “Robert Castellano” and other officers, and they later received criminal convictions due to Watkins’ wrongful arrest. 

High-profile convictions involving federal agents typically take time and often involve multiple court decisions and public statements from attorneys. This makes it even more suspicious that a search for reputable news articles about the alleged incident returned no relevant results. 

Furthermore, the story claimed that the officers did not know Watkins recorded them and that she did not reveal this particular detail until Castellano arrested her. 

Those details directly contradicted the fact that the story was shared alongside ahigh-definition image of the fake incident, in which Watkins supposedly sat in her car and showed Castellano a voice memo recording. 

The level of definition in the image of the woman holding a phone is also more typical of a professional camera, not an iPhone or a surveillance recording. The unnaturally smooth and high-definition look of the images also pointed to AI generation.

Several Facebook accounts that reposted the story used a different image of the woman, in which she had short hair, rather than shoulder-length hair, and looked like a different person. 

Multiple AI-detection tools, including Hive Moderation and ZeroGPT, indicated that these images were highly likely to be AI-generated. ZeroGPT also determined that 77% of the story’s text was AI-generated. (While these tools are not foolproof, they provide additional evidence when determining whether a content creator used AI to generate a claim.) 

Snopes previously published an explainer on how to determine whether content was generated using AI.