Category: Fact Checking

In mid-January 2025, images of a man with a bruised and cut face circulated online alongside claims that officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement caused his injuries. 

The images spread on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Posts claimed the man’s name was Juan Carlos and ICE agents assaulted him in Minneapolis; some posts claimed the man was a U.S. citizen. Some social media users expressed skepticism about the legitimacy of the images.  

These images originated from a Facebook post and GoFundMe page by Ismael Cordová-Clough, who appears to be affiliated with several activist groups tracking immigration enforcement activity (screenshot). Cordová-Clough created a GoFundMe (archived) on behalf of a man named Juan Carlos; the GoFundMe’s description said he was a U.S. resident “assaulted” while “observing ICE activity” in Minneapolis. 

Cordová-Clough‘s description of what the image showed largely aligned with a report from the Minnesota Reformer, a reputable online news outlet focused on the state’s policy and politics. The Reformer obtained a video of a man who said his name was Juan Carlos after one of the several Border Patrol (not ICE) agents restraining him repeatedly kneed him in the face. Snopes also found no evidence disproving the images’ authenticity. However, we have not rated this claim because there was not enough proof to definitively verify that these photos showed the same man in the video. 

When asked about Border Patrol’s conduct in the video, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said via email that she had a statement regarding “that edited video” but did not provide that statement or any additional comment. Cordová-Clough did not immediately return a request for more information about the man he identified as Juan Carlos.

The video reported on by the Reformer and the images posted by Cordová-Clough of the man who appeared to identify himself as Juan Carlos did not show any signs of being doctored. The witness who took the video, first identified by the Minnesota Reformer as Monica Bicking, shared her full four-minute video with Snopes for verification purposes. She said in an email:

The video was not edited. I saw ICE brutalize a completely helpless man with my own eyes. I thought they were going to kill him right in-front of me. I’m an ER nurse, trained to help, but all I could do is scream. I haven’t slept through the night since.

Here’s what we know as of this writing:

Images originate from ICE activist 

On Jan. 10, 2026, Cordová-Clough posted on his verified Facebook account about a “fellow patrolman” named Juan Carlos whom Cordová-Clough said Border Patrol agents assaulted on Jan. 9 near “22nd & Chicago” in Minneapolis. Cordová-Clough shared the post jointly with various people and activist groups largely based in Illinois, such as Immigrant Solidarity DuPage. (Cordová-Clough previously said on his Facebook that patrollers from Chicago have traveled to Minnesota amid the federal crackdown on immigration enforcement there.) 

“LOCAL PATROL ATTACKED BY BORDER PATROL,” Facebook’s English translation of Cordová-Clough’s original Spanish post began. 

(Ismael Cordová-Clough)

Comments underneath the post contained five photos of a man identified as Juan Carlos and a video of the Border Patrol agents attacking someone, presumably Juan Carlos. Another comment included an image of a ticket for an immigration enforcement fine — formally known as a U.S. District Court Violation Notice — addressed to a person with the first and middle name “Juan Carlos” for “Failure to carry Alien Registration.” The ticket included a court date set in Minneapolis. 

(While a World War II-era law known as the Alien Registration Act required foreign nationals to carry proof of registration at all times, it was not regularly enforced until President Donald Trump’s second administration created a process requiring them to register with the federal government.) 

In a Jan. 14 email, the Central Violations Bureau, which oversees immigration enforcement violations, said it takes six to eight weeks to process violations and that the aforementioned violation “has not been processed.” 

Cordová-Clough also set up a GoFundMe page to raise funds support to Juan Carlos, which he shared in a comment in the Facebook post. According to both the Facebook post and the GoFundMe page, Juan Carlos is a U.S. resident who “is currently unhoused and living in his car.” Neither the Facebook nor the GoFundMe claimed Juan Carlos was a U.S. citizen. Both said Juan Carlos was first taken to the Whipple Federal Building, presumably for law enforcement processing, before being taken to a hospital “because he was having difficulty breathing.” 

“Juan Carlos has permitted me to share these photos and this update. Once his phone is fully set up, he plans to make his own Facebook post as well,” Cordová-Clough wrote on the GoFundMe page, which had paused donations as of this writing. 

A later Jan. 10 Facebook post (screenshot) from Cordová-Clough appeared to show him on a video call with Juan Carlos and another person with a blurred face. The update said Cordová-Clough’s “contact in Minneapolis” had placed Juan Carlos in a hotel and that Juan Carlos extends his “deepest gratitude” to those who have shown support and shared his story. 

A reverse-image search found no evidence of these images being published online prior to Cordová-Clough’s posts. The images also showed no signs of editing via artificial intelligence, and the artificial intelligence detectors Sight Engine and Hive Moderation determined that the photos were not likely generated using artificial intelligence. (Such detectors are not always accurate, and their findings should be carefully considered.)

Video shows Border Patrol agent kneeing man in face

Two days after Cordová-Clough’s post, the Minnesota Reformer reported that a “U.S. Border Patrol agent kneed a man at least five times in the face while several other agents held him pinned facedown on the pavement in south Minneapolis,” according to Bicking’s video. The Reformer also published a separate video reportedly showing the aftermath of the arrest and spoke to multiple witnesses. 

The video of the agent kneeing the man in the face was the same one Cordová-Clough posted. Bicking said she was not directly in contact with Cordová-Clough, but that she passed the video along to “somewhat anonymous people working on support for people abducted by ICE” who said they were in contact with him. 

“I do believe by the time Ismael had posted the GoFundMe page it was on social media,” Bicking said. 

Bicking shared a screenshot of the metadata from the video, which indicated that it was taken about noon Jan. 9 on Minneapolis’ Chicago Avenue — details that align with what Cordová-Clough wrote in his posts. 

In the video, the man can be heard screaming out in pain while Bicking yells, “Stop kneeing him in the face! That’s his face! Stop it!” An officer tells Bicking to back up or she’ll be arrested. At 0:40, the label “Border Patrol” is visible on the officer’s vest. 

Bystanders repeatedly ask the man for his name, and he responds with what sounds like, “Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos,” which the witness seems to mishear as “Ricardo” (see 0:59). 

 

The Reformer’s article said the incident happened “in the middle of Chicago Avenue” and that a witness saw the scene unfold from a window on “Chicago Avenue near 24th Street.” In both videos, a building with a “Hope Academy” sign was partially or fully visible. According to Google Maps and Google Street View, Hope Academy is located on Chicago Avenue and 24th Street in Minneapolis. Chicago and 22nd Street, the intersection Cordová-Clough referenced in his posts, is a block away from Chicago Avenue and 24th Street. 

The Reformer’s report said the news outlet “has not verified the man’s identity, but received a copy of the car’s purchase contract for a man with the first and middle names Juan Carlos.” The journalist behind the Reformer’s story, Max Nesterak, said via text that a source on the scene took the contract out of Juan Carlos’ car at the scene. (Nesterak declined to name that source.)

Nesterak also shared a copy of the contract with Snopes, which we verified as authentic by using public information for various details listed on the contract, including a Minnesota Department and Vehicle Services search for the driver’s license number listed on it. The last name on the car contract matched the name on the ticket posted by Cordová-Clough.

While other news outlets have not covered the incident in depth, as of this writing, The Minnesota Star Tribune, the largest paper in the state, published an op-ed from writer and nonprofit worker Jennifer Manthey, who described seeing a man “being beaten on Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis by five Border Patrol agents” and “being repeatedly kneed in the face.” Manthey said she had a video similar to the one being shared on social media but has not shared it publicly. 

In sum …

It was demonstrably true that a Border Patrol agent kneed a man in the face, and in authentic video of that event that man appeared to say his name was Juan Carlos. The evidence available also suggested the images are a legitimate representation of the aftermath of that incident. However, until the man possibly named Juan Carlos comes forward, it was not possible to definitively determine whether the photos did, in fact, show the same man a Border Patrol agent repeatedly kneed. 

In mid-January 2026, rumors circulated online that Ford Motor Co. suspended an autoworker from his job after he heckled U.S. President Donald Trump during a visit to a Michigan factory. 

The rumor spread widely on social media after a popular X account shared the claim (archived), claiming that the worker called Trump a “pedophile protector” and was suspended as a result. 

Other users sharing the rumor on X (archived) included purported video of the incident, which ended with Trump apparently giving the worker the middle finger. 

⚡️🇺🇸BREAKING:

TJ Sabula, the worker who shouted at Trump, has been suspended.

This started when Trump showed his middle finger and appears to say “fuck you” after Ford worker yells “pedophile protector”. Now that worker has been suspended. pic.twitter.com/j1o5Q5qx95

— Suppressed News. (@SuppressedNws1) January 14, 2026

The incident occurred Jan. 13, 2026, during Trump’s visit to a Ford facility in Dearborn.

TJ Sabula, reportedly a 40-year-old United Auto Workers Local 600 line worker at the factory, told The Washington Post he was the person who shouted at Trump in the video and said he had been suspended from work pending an investigation. Multiple people launched crowdfunding efforts on GoFundMe to raise money for Sabula.

As of this writing, Snopes was unable to independently confirm Sabula’s identity or his suspension, so we have left this claim unrated. 

According to the Post, Sabula said he had “no regrets whatsoever” about his actions but expressed concern about the future of his position. The outlet reported Sabula believed he was being “targeted for political retribution” after “embarrassing Trump in front of his friends.”

Video of the incident published by the tabloid news outlet TMZ depicted Trump walking out of the factory as somebody off camera shouted at him. The person in the video called Trump a”pedophile protector,” alluding to his ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

Trump then pointed down toward the heckler and appeared to mouth “f*** you” twice before very clearly giving the middle finger. 

Snopes reached out to Sabula via Facebook Messenger to confirm that he was the person in the video and that he was suspended. We will update this article if we receive a response. 

In an email to Snopes, a White House spokesperson confirmed the authenticity of the video and defended Trump’s reaction, writing, “A lunatic was wildly screaming expletives in a complete fit of rage, and the President gave an appropriate and unambiguous response.” 

The White House did not respond to a follow-up question about the president’s middle finger gesture in reaction to the heckler’s comments.

Ford did not respond to Snopes’ request for comment, but TMZ reported that a company spokesperson provided the following statement: 

We had a great event today and we’re proud of how our employees represented Ford. We’ve seen the clip you’re referring to. One of our core values is respect and we don’t condone anyone saying anything inappropriate like that within our facilities. When that happens, we have a process to deal with it but we don’t get into specific personnel matters.

Laura Dickerson, a vice president of UAW, the labor union that reportedly represented Sabula, appeared to confirm his suspension in an online statement that read: 

The autoworker at the Dearborn Truck Plant is a proud member of a strong and fighting union —the UAW. He believes in freedom of speech, a principle we wholeheartedly embrace, and we stand with our membership in protecting their voice on the job.

The UAW will ensure that our member receives the full protection of all negotiated contract language safeguarding his job and his rights as a union member.

Workers should never be subjected to vulgar language or behavior by anyone—including the President of the United States.

Dickerson’s statement also was posted to the UAW Facebook page (archived). 

In sum, rumors of Sabula’s suspension following the confrontation with Trump appeared to be true, but Snopes was unable to confirm this directly with him as of publication. We will update this story if new information becomes available. 

President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send federal military forces to Minneapolis in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in the city. We’ll explain what the law says about the president’s authority to do so.

Trump cited the act in a Jan. 15 social media post, eight days after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good during a protest confrontation. The shooting sparked more protests in Minneapolis and the Trump administration’s deployment of hundreds more immigration officers to join 2,000 Department of Homeland Security agents sent to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as of early this month, according to DHS. The department has called it “Operation Metro Surge.”

“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

On Jan. 12, Minnesota and the Twin Cities filed a lawsuit against DHS, asking the courts to end the surge of immigration officers, calling it “unconstitutional and unlawful.” The suit says that the “agents’ reckless tactics endanger the public safety, health, and welfare of all Minnesotans.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said on Jan. 15 that the city’s police force was “approximately 600,” while there were “approximately 3,000 ICE agents in the area.” The latter figure, which includes other DHS officers, not solely ICE, amounts to “nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.

Last fall, Trump similarly said he could invoke the Insurrection Act to override the objections of the Illinois and Oregon governors to Trump’s National Guard troop deployments in those states. (Those deployments have been blocked by the courts while litigation proceeds.) Here, we’ll repeat much of what we wrote about the law in an Oct. 17 article about the issue then.

What’s the Insurrection Act?

Under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, federal military forces can’t perform civilian law enforcement tasks. However, the Insurrection Act provides an exception to this.

Under the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, a state legislature or governor could request that the president send federal military forces to suppress an insurrection, or the president could invoke the act himself “[w]henever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” the statute says.

The president also can invoke the act to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in two scenarios: if it “hinders the execution” of state and federal laws and deprives people’s constitutional rights or protections and state authorities “are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity”; or if the insurrection/violence “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”

Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, wrote in an explainer on the Insurrection Act that, in theory, it “should be used only in a crisis that is truly beyond the capacity of civilian authorities to manage,” but the statute “fails to adequately define or limit when it may be used.” Nunn, who has written about limiting the use of the military for law enforcement purposes, said the statute is “dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.”

In his Jan. 15 social media post, Trump said that “many” presidents have used the act, and a week prior, he said that “48 percent of the presidents have used it.”

Eighteen of 45 presidents, or 40%, have invoked the act for crises such as rebellions, labor disputes and enforcing civil rights federal court orders. Most of these crises occurred prior to 1900. The most recent use of the act was in 1992, when the California governor asked President George H.W. Bush to do so in order to send federal troops to assist with civil unrest that erupted in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers charged for beating Rodney King, a Black motorist.

The Brennan Center for Justice has a list of all times the Insurrection Act has been used for 30 crises, dating back to 1794 under President George Washington. Troops have not always been deployed. “Sometimes the mere threat of military intervention has been enough to resolve a crisis,” the Brennan Center said.

William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law, and Mark P. Nevitt, an associate professor at Emory University School of Law, wrote in a piece for Just Security that “the last time the National Guard was federalized over a governor’s objection was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed the Guard to Selma, Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.” Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act.

In 1989, Bush invoked the act to send troops to the Virgin Islands to quell lawlessness following the destruction caused by Hurricane Hugo. The Brennan Center says there’s a dispute over whether the territorial governor of the islands requested the federal deployment.

There’s “little case law” on the act, Nevitt told us last fall. Nevitt said in an email that the “leading case is from the War of 1812 (Martin v. Mott), where the Supreme Court suggested that the president has broad discretion in interpreting the act’s statutory language.”

Nevitt said there’s no judicial review in the statute and “courts have been reluctant to second-guess presidential authority in using the military,” but the courts are addressing such authority in the cases in California, Oregon and Illinois involving federalization of the National Guard over governors’ objections. “A court challenge is likely,” if Trump uses the Insurrection Act, “but it remains to be seen whether a federal judge will find the case justiciable,” Nevitt said.

Nunn wrote that the high court “has suggested that courts may step in if the president acts in bad faith, exceeds ‘a permitted range of honest judgment,’ makes an obvious mistake, or acts in a way manifestly unauthorized by law” and “that courts may still review the lawfulness of the military’s actions once deployed.”

In an Oct. 12 ABC News interview, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is also a former U.S. attorney, said that if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, “you can’t stop him if you’re the governor.” But the governor “could always bring a court action and then the courts could decide whether the facts are there to support his [Trump’s] invocation of the Insurrection Act,” Christie said.

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Claim:

A photo authentically showed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good, hospitalized after suffering internal bleeding following the shooting.

Rating:

In January 2026, a photo (archived) circulated online that claimed to show the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good, 37, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026, sparking nationwide protests of the immigration enforcement agency’s actions.

The photo spread after CBS reported, citing anonymous sources, that the agent who fired the shots suffered internal bleeding.

One X account that shared the photo claiming to show the agent in the hospital wrote, “US Department of Homeland Security release hospital photo of ICE agent who murdered Renee Good after reports of internal bleeding.” The photo showed a person’s arm wearing what appeared to be a hospital bracelet with what was clearly an Apple MacBook charger wire draped across it.

The photo and claim circulated mainly on X (archived), but also appeared on Facebook (archived). Snopes readers searched our site for information about the photo.

While the photo appeared to be real, meaning not generated by artificial intelligence or digitally edited, it did not show the ICE agent who shot Good — or even a person admitted to a hospital. The photo was part of a viral 2016 Twitter (now X) post by Terrell Finner, then a pre-med student at Columbia University. Finner reportedly joked online that he would submit two obviously staged photos to his professor in attempt to avoid an exam. 

The above posting of the photo in January 2026, which had 1.5 million views at the time of this writing, came from an X account that described itself as satire. The photo did not appear on the X feed of the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is an agency. Therefore, we conclude that social media users who shared the photo in 2026 miscaptioned the image.

According to the Daily Mail, Finner posted the photo with the MacBook charger cable and another that showed him with earphones up his nose in an imitation of oxygen tubes in February 2016. Finner reportedly wrote: “I’m emailing these pics to my chem prof bc I had a nosebleed & had to be hospitalized & can’t take this midterm Wed.”

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives webpages across the internet, showed that a user called @_KingAres, the same username that the Daily Mail credited in its reporting, did make a post on Twitter with an identical caption in February 2016. The Wayback Machine’s snapshot did not show the pictures Finner reportedly attached.

DHS has maintained (archived) that the officer who killed Good, identified by media outlets as Jonathan Ross, “fired defensive shots” because he feared for his life. On X, the DHS claimed Good had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.”

Snopes does not rely on anonymous sources, so we could not independently verify CBS’ report that the agent suffered internal bleeding after the encounter during which he fatally shot Good. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem previously said (at 1:32, archived) that the agent received medical treatment at a hospital but that doctors released him after a few hours. Bystander footage from the scene showed the agent walking away following the shooting.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, “internal bleeding,” where blood vessels break and blood collects inside the body, can vary in severity. The term covers anything from bruises to burst aneurysms.

Snopes has reported extensively on Good’s death, including a claim that a DHS officer defaced a memorial to her.

Sources

In sweeping changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends universal vaccination against six diseases. In justifying the move, health officials made misleading claims about vaccine safety while downplaying or omitting benefits.

In signing a Jan. 5 memo, CDC Acting Director Jim O’Neill eliminated routine childhood recommendations for vaccines against four diseases: rotavirus, hepatitis A, meningococcal disease and influenza. We’ll assess the rationale for the change for those vaccines. Previously, O’Neill accepted proposals to end the universal recommendation for hepatitis B and COVID-19 vaccination. We previously addressed misleading and unfounded claims about those shots.

The CDC now recommends all children receive vaccines targeting 11 diseases, down from 17 just a few months ago.

The latest changes came after President Donald Trump asked O’Neill and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Dec. 5 to review vaccine schedules of “peer, developed countries” and consider “aligning” the U.S. schedule with them.

“After an exhaustive review of the evidence, we are aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus while strengthening transparency and informed consent,” Kennedy said in a Jan. 5 press release announcing the changes.

However, as we have written previously, vaccine schedules among high-income nations are quite similar. In recommending vaccination against just 11 diseases, the U.S. childhood schedule now universally targets fewer diseases than nearly all other “peer nations,” as defined in a table cited in the HHS memo, with the sole exception of Denmark.

The Jan. 5 memo bypassed the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This group for many years followed a formal, evidence-based process — occurring over months and involving experts with multiple specialties — to assess potential changes to the vaccine schedule. Findings were presented to experts and the public in advance of making changes.

To justify the recent changes, HHS officials instead cited a 33-page assessment prepared by two political appointees: Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a doctor specializing in sports medicine who is acting director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drugs division; and Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist whose appointment to an HHS leadership role was announced last month. Kulldorff was formerly the chair of ACIP after Kennedy reconstituted the committee in June.

O’Neill was chosen for his CDC role after the prior director was fired following clashes with Kennedy over the vaccine schedule.

“You basically have a group of federal appointees going behind closed doors and making recommendations about a vaccine — without any input from the public, without any input from experts in the field — and just making up their own schedule,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us.

The six vaccines dropped from universal recommendations are now recommended under shared clinical decision-making, which means that people may still get these vaccines after a discussion with a health care provider. (Surveys done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, our parent organization, found some misunderstanding of the term among the public.) This designation was previously used for uncommon cases where a vaccine was “not recommended for everyone in a particular age group or everyone in an identifiable risk group,” according to the CDC. There remain stronger recommendations that children with certain risk factors get hepatitis A, hepatitis B and meningococcal disease vaccines.

For the time being, the changes largely do not alter whether insurers cover vaccination, and the affected vaccines should be available at no cost, according to a review from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization.

We asked HHS a variety of questions, including why the normal process for changing the vaccine schedule was not followed. Press Secretary Emily G. Hilliard described Trump’s memo asking for a review of vaccination recommendations. “The updated CDC childhood immunization schedule reflects the results of that thorough review and preserves access and insurance coverage to all vaccines currently available to American children and adolescents,” she said.

Rotavirus

Rotavirus is a gastrointestinal infection that causes diarrhea, vomiting and fever and can lead to dangerous dehydration. According to the analysis in the HHS assessment, 17 out of 20 peer nations routinely recommend vaccination against the disease.

In justifying no longer recommending rotavirus vaccines routinely, HHS officials deemphasized the significant number of hospitalizations the vaccines prevent while also minimizing the number of children the virus previously killed.

“In the U.S., it can cause hospitalization for gastroenteritis, but the virus poses almost no risk of either mortality or chronic morbidity,” the assessment and memo both said.

Offit, the vaccine expert from CHOP, told us that the suffering caused by rotavirus was significant. Offit co-invented one of the two available rotavirus vaccines.

Prior to the 2006 CDC recommendation to vaccinate all babies against the disease using an oral vaccine beginning at 2 months of age, around 55,000 to 70,000 children were hospitalized each year due to rotavirus, according to a 2018 review by CDC researchers.

“It’s very hard for parents to rehydrate their child orally when the child is constantly vomiting,” Offit told us, recalling that before rotavirus vaccines were available, his hospital during his pediatric residency saw around 400 inpatients with severe dehydration from rotavirus each year. He also saw a previously healthy nine-month-old girl die of the disease. Today, he said, “most pediatric residents at our hospital have never seen an inpatient with rotavirus dehydration.”

Vaccination not only lowers the risk of hospitalization in vaccinated people, the CDC review noted, but it also lowers transmission and, therefore, the risk of hospitalization in those who are not vaccinated. 

The assessment went on to give low estimates of rotavirus deaths in the pre-vaccine era. “Data from CDC indicate that among all U.S. children <15 years of age, there were an average of 3.3 deaths per year with the rotavirus diagnostic code listed on the death certificate between 1999 and 2005,” they wrote, citing a CDC database.

The 2018 review by CDC researchers estimated 20 to 60 deaths from rotavirus annually before the vaccines were recommended.

The assessment’s approach of estimating deaths relies on the deaths being recorded using a specific code, Offit said. “That’s a fairly blunt tool and no doubt is an underestimate,” he said. An HHS spokesperson did not answer a question on why the assessment estimated rotavirus deaths in this way.

Meningococcal Disease

Since 2005, the CDC has universally recommended a vaccine, MenACWY, at age 11 or 12 that targets four subtypes of meningococcal bacteria to protect against meningitis and sepsis. These infections are rare but are very serious and can be fatal. In 2010, the agency added a universal recommendation for a booster dose at age 16. (A separate vaccine exists for meningococcal type B bacteria, but it has not been recommended for all children in the U.S.)

Under the new changes, the MenACWY vaccine is now recommended for all kids only under shared clinical decision-making. For high-risk groups, including those with certain medical conditions, college freshmen living in residential housing or those traveling to certain countries, the vaccine remains fully recommended.

The cited rationale for removing the universal recommendation was primarily that the disease incidence is low, currently around 0.12 cases per 100,000 people. The memo and assessment particularly cited World Health Organization guidelines, which advise widespread vaccination when the incidence is 2 cases per 100,000 or higher. The HHS documents also pointed to a country comparison to suggest that universal vaccination programs have not driven down disease rates and noted that not all peer countries recommend meningococcal vaccination for all children.

“The incidence of meningococcal disease has declined during the past decades, both in countries with and without the routine vaccine recommendations for children, and the magnitude of the decline appears to be independent of vaccination policy,” the memo said.

While there isn’t universal agreement on routine meningococcal vaccination, most high-income countries do recommend the shots — even though their disease incidence is also low. According to the health officials’ own count, 15 out of 20 peer nations have a recommendation for all children, while five have a risk-based recommendation. Some nations, such as Germany, Switzerland and the U.K., now routinely recommend two different meningococcal vaccines during childhood.

Meningococcal disease is indeed rare in the U.S. But several experts told us this is not a reason to stop vaccinating. They also disputed the suggestion that vaccination hasn’t helped to lower disease incidence.

“Every parent should want to prevent this disease in their children,” Dr. David S. Stephens, an expert on bacterial meningitis at Emory University, told us, noting the seriousness of meningococcal disease.

Even with antibiotics and proper medical care, around 15% of patients die and as many as 20% are left with after-effects of the illness, including amputations, neurologic disabilities and hearing loss, according to a 2020 summary report of ACIP’s recommendations for meningococcal vaccines.

“[L]ow incidence in the context of a vaccination program is what we want,” Stephens said in an email. “Even though polio is very low in the US we still recommend routine vaccination.” 

Stephens, who is a member of the expert panels advising the WHO and the CDC on meningococcal vaccination, noted that the disease is more common among adolescents and young adults than in the general population and that the incidence can fluctuate. CDC data show that in recent years, infections have surged, with 2024 posting 503 confirmed or probable cases of meningococcal disease — the highest number since 2013. Antibiotic resistance is also increasingly a problem.

Stephens said that the vaccination program has helped reduce disease incidence and that the MenACWY vaccines in particular provide “significant ‘herd’ protection to the unvaccinated.” He said the cited country comparison “has no bearing on the question of meningococcal vaccine effectiveness.”

“It is well known that the disease incidence began to decline before the introduction of the meningococcal vaccine, however, there is evidence that the decline was faster after the introduction of the vaccines,” Dr. Jaime Fergie, an infectious diseases specialist with Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Texas, told us, citing a 2020 paper. 

He added that a 2024 modeling study estimated that through 2021, vaccination in the U.S. prevented 500 cases of invasive meningococcal diseases and 54 deaths of people 11 to 23 years of age. Without vaccination, invasive meningococcal disease incidence “would have been at least 59% higher than reported,” the study concluded.

The HHS memo also misleadingly noted that the current meningococcal vaccines “were not evaluated in large-scale double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trials before FDA approval.”

While true, Caroline Trotter, infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge who specializes in vaccine-preventable bacterial meningitis and also advises the WHO on meningococcal vaccination, told us this is “because such studies were not ethical (because of the existence of already licensed polysaccharide vaccines for MenACWY) or feasible (given the large numbers that would have to be recruited).”

When vaccines that protect against a disease already exist, it’s unethical to test newer versions against a saline placebo, since the control group would have to forgo any protection.

“There is compelling evidence from a range of different settings, including the UK, that meningococcal vaccines are safe and effective,” she added.

“The change in schedule will increase vaccine disparities, we are also likely to see the return of this disease in more adolescents, young adults, and others over the next decade,” Stephens said.

Influenza

The CDC first recommended annual flu shots for all children 6 months and older in 2008, when it expanded the recommendation to include school-aged children 5 to 18 years old. The agency had already recommended the shot for children under the age of 2 in 2004 and children below the age of 5 in 2006. 

According to the published ACIP recommendation, the decision was based on “accumulated evidence” of the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness in school-aged kids, “increased evidence” of flu’s “substantial adverse impacts among school-aged children and their contacts,” and “an expectation” that the simpler recommendation would boost vaccine uptake among kids who were at higher risk of severe disease or were in contact with such individuals. About half of school-aged children were in that category and were already recommended to get vaccinated.

Children below the age of 5 and those with certain chronic conditions are at higher risk for flu complications such as pneumonia, according to the agency, but healthy older children can also get seriously ill. 

Death is rare, but does occur. Since the 2004-2005 flu season, reported pediatric flu deaths, which are likely an undercount of the true number of deaths, have averaged 137 a year when excluding the 2020-2021 season during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year’s flu season was rough, however, and 289 children died — the most since the agency began tracking deaths over two decades ago. More than 40% of those children did not have underlying medical conditions, and nearly 90% had not been fully vaccinated. This year is also shaping up to be an unusually bad flu season.

In explaining why they no longer recommended universal flu vaccination for kids, health officials pointed to the lack of randomized controlled trial data showing a hospitalization or death benefit of flu vaccination in children.

“The trials could not evaluate differences in hospitalizations or mortality, as there were none or few in either group, so they provide no evidence that the vaccines reduce hospitalization or deaths,” the memo said, citing a 2018 Cochrane review, which the health officials called the “most comprehensive review.” 

The memo also dismissed observational studies, calling one particular type of study — the test-negative case-control study — “a notoriously biased study design with highly implausible results,” and the memo referred to a “scarcity of reliable safety data.”

In an interview with CBS News on Jan. 7, HHS Secretary Kennedy also cited the Cochrane review when he said it may be “better” if fewer kids receive the flu vaccine as a result of the new policy. “They found that there is no evidence that the flu vaccine prevents serious disease or that it prevents hospitalizations or death in children,” he said, referring to the Cochrane authors. “There’s no scientific evidence. And what we tried to do is to follow the science.”

Experts, however, say this is misleading.

The Cochrane review, which focused almost exclusively on randomized controlled trials, did not identify hospitalization or death benefits of flu vaccination, but it also did not include any trials with data on those outcomes. It did, notably, find evidence that flu shots worked to reduce influenza in children.

Dr. Mark Loeb, an infectious diseases specialist at McMaster University in Canada who has studied flu vaccines, told us that one of the limitations of randomized controlled trials is that they are not practical to use to evaluate outcomes that are rare, such as hospitalization or death in this case. “Because the outcomes are very rare” in healthy kids, he said of influenza, “you’d need millions of people in a randomized controlled trial.”

This does not mean that flu vaccines don’t work to prevent severe outcomes, but that randomized trials are not an ideal way to measure those potential benefits. Loeb said that he primarily conducts randomized trials — and thinks such trials should be done whenever possible — but not in this case.

“The HHS Decision Memo ignores the fact that clinical trials are not powered to detect rare outcomes such as hospitalization and death,” Dr. Edward Belongia, a global expert on flu vaccine effectiveness who retired from the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin last year, told us in an email. “Post-licensure observational studies are needed to provide valid estimates of influenza vaccine protection in the real world, including protection against serious outcomes.”

Contrary to HHS’ claim that test-negative case-control studies are “notoriously biased,” Loeb said they were “one of the most rigorous forms of observational studies.” 

Belongia said the test-negative design “is the current gold standard” for observational studies of influenza vaccine effectiveness, noting that it “has been directly compared with clinical trial data and shown to generate comparable results.”

In such studies, patients needing medical care for respiratory illness are enrolled in the study and then tested for influenza, Belongia explained. Vaccine effectiveness can then be estimated based on the number of “case” patients who test positive for flu compared with the number of control patients who test negative. “An important advantage of this design is that it inherently controls for bias due to differences in health care seeking behavior,” he said.

“Like the Cochrane review authors, the HHS Decision Memo ignores a large body of evidence that influenza vaccines are effective in children, including substantial protection against severe illness,” Belongia added, citing multiple papers.

A review published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October, for example, which looked at the evidence since ACIP’s last review of the subject a few years ago, identified a vaccine effectiveness of 67% in preventing pediatric hospitalization. Another study, assessing vaccine effectiveness during the 2015-2016 season, found vaccination was 56% effective against hospitalization in children.

Last year, Loeb also published a review of test-negative studies on flu vaccination, which concluded that “[s]easonal influenza vaccination moderately reduces severe influenza-related outcomes, particularly in children.”

As for safety, Loeb said that unless a person has had a severe allergic reaction to a previous flu shot, the vaccine is a “very safe” vaccine. “There is a large amount of safety data,” he said, and “very good evidence” that the benefits “greatly outweigh” the risks.

Hepatitis A

The hepatitis A virus infects the liver, in rare cases causing liver failure and death. HHS officials emphasized the low incidence and death rate from hepatitis A, while making misleading claims about the safety of hepatitis A vaccines.

Hepatitis A vaccination was first recommended for some children in 1996 and eventually universally recommended in 2006 starting at 12 months of age. Now, the vaccines are recommended for all kids only after discussion with a doctor, although they are still fully recommended for kids traveling to countries with high or intermediate levels of hepatitis A, which is spread in feces.

“Given the low U.S. incidence and mortality, and the lack of randomized placebo-controlled safety data, the benefit-risk ratio is at best very low for most children,” the assessment and memo both said. An HHS spokesperson did not answer a question about what harms from hepatitis A vaccination the documents were referring to.

Dr. Noele Nelson, a physician and epidemiologist at Cornell University, told us the new recommendations are “missing the big picture” of why hepatitis A vaccination was recommended for children in the first place. Nelson was previously in leadership roles at the CDC, including as a branch chief in the viral hepatitis division.

Young children are not at high risk of death or severe illness from hepatitis A and generally have no symptoms when infected, but they do transmit the virus, Nelson explained. Those at higher risk of severe disease include adults over the age of 40 and people with certain health conditions.

Children can shed the hepatitis A virus in their stool for months, and it can remain infectious on surfaces for months, according to a 2020 report co-authored by Nelson, which summarized a review of hepatitis A vaccination by ACIP. Children “can transmit in daycare centers, they can transmit in schools, they can transmit to caretakers,” Nelson told us. It “used to be children in diapers were the ones who were spreading it to susceptible adults,” she said. If vaccination rates go down substantially, “it’s very conceivable that you would start to see that again.”

Vaccinating kids against hepatitis A both prevents them from spreading the virus and protects them into adulthood, as the vaccine “has long-term effectiveness and likely confers lifetime immunity, really one of the marvels of vaccinology,” Nelson added.

The HHS assessment and memo also cast doubt on the safety of the hepatitis A vaccines, misleadingly claiming that “without a proper placebo-controlled randomized trial, reliable safety data is limited.”

As we’ve written in the past, this is an anti-vaccine trope that relies on a very narrow definition of a proper clinical trial and dismisses other types of studies that can be used to help establish vaccine safety.

The clinical trials testing the hepatitis A vaccines “were incredibly successful, with no severe adverse events noted,” Nelson said, adding that in her judgment they were “done properly.” Furthermore, she said, data on vaccine safety are regularly reviewed, including by ACIP for the 2020 review and update she participated in. “Again, there were no concerning or unexpected safety findings,” she said.

One randomized, placebo-controlled trial that the assessment did not consider “proper” in their assessment compared a hepatitis A vaccine to a vaccine diluent. This contained an aluminum adjuvant, used in hepatitis A vaccines to stimulate a better immune response, as well as a preservative formerly used in the vaccines. These vaccine ingredients have a proven safety record. A second trial used a hepatitis B vaccine as a control.

Vaccinologist John Grabenstein, formerly head of medical affairs at Merck, told Science that it is common to use such controls in vaccine clinical trials. Merck’s hepatitis A vaccine, for example, he said, was compared to the diluent so that the trial could remain blinded and people would be less likely to tell whether they had been given the vaccine.

The other vaccine, made by GSK, was compared with a hepatitis B vaccine in a clinical trial in Thailand because the researchers wanted to ensure all children got some benefit from enrolling, the Science article explained. Using the hepatitis B vaccine in the control group also helped the trial remain blinded, Nelson told us.

She said that regardless of which groups they were assigned to, the participants in the trials only experienced “common, expected reactions,” such as pain at the injection site and fever. She added it was difficult to see, “even if those studies were done differently, how that would have changed the findings.”

Offering universal hepatitis A vaccination for children is a relatively uncommon practice among high-income nations. Among the 20 peer nations in the assessment, just one — Greece — had a universal hepatitis A vaccine recommendation.

However, stopping hepatitis A vaccination in childhood has risks, Nelson said. There are currently adults who are too old to have been routinely vaccinated as children but who grew up at a time when childhood infection was becoming less common. As a result, many don’t have immunity from past infection. Because infection is riskier when people are older, this group of people is now at risk of severe disease.

The problem with “not vaccinating children, when you still have circulating virus in the population and continued threats from food and threats from travel, is that you can increase the number of children with hepatitis A, which can then increase the number of adults,” Nelson said. Then “you really start to see this increase in morbidity and mortality, hospitalizations, and cost and burden on health care.”

In addition, children who never get vaccinated and who avoid infection will be susceptible to infection and severe disease as they age.

Low rates of hepatitis are “not a reason to stop vaccinating,” Nelson said, “because as soon as you let your guard down, or let that susceptible population increase, then you open yourself up to disease.”

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As U.S. President Donald Trump launched sweeping immigration enforcement operations across major cities in 2025 and 2026, legal experts analyzed how much authority federal immigration officers, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, could have over U.S. citizens.

The question was a hot topic in January 2026, when Trump deployed around 2,000 ICE agents in the Minneapolis area to crackdown on alleged illegal immigration. On Jan. 7, an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen. (White House officials have said Good tried to run over the agent who shot her, while media analyses challenged the veracity of that account.)

Snopes previously addressed this issue in June 2025, after then-New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was arrested by ICE agents at a courthouse while he was volunteering with a group that accompanies immigrants to and from their court hearings.

Lenni Benson, professor of immigration and human rights law at New York School of Law, told Snopes over email that ICE’s targeting of immigrants attending their court hearings is “an attempt by the [Department of Homeland Security] to rapidly detain a high number of people, including those who have complied with all requests and have sought asylum.”

Our readers questioned whether ICE, which focuses on immigration-related crimes, had the authority to arrest people without a warrant and whether ICE has the power to arrest U.S. citizens like Lander. Below, we break down the laws governing ICE agents, the warrants they use and their authority when it comes to U.S. citizens. 

We spoke to a number of immigration lawyers and reached out to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

When can ICE arrest someone without a warrant?

According to 8 U.S. Code 1357, “Powers of immigration officers and employees,” subsection “Powers without warrant,” summarized below, immigration agents do not need warrants for the following actions: 

1. To interrogate any alien or person believed to be alien about their right to be or remain in the United States.

2. To arrest an alien who, in the agent’s presence, is apparently entering the United States in violation of laws or regulations, particularly if the agent has reason to believe the alien can escape before a warrant can be obtained.

3. To board and search for aliens on any vessel in the territorial waters of the United States within “reasonable distance” from any external boundary of the United States, as well as “any railway car, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle, and within a distance of twenty-five miles from any such external boundary to have access to private lands, but not dwellings.” This access is for the purpose of patrolling the border.

4. To arrest people for “felonies which have been committed and which are cognizable under any law of the United States regulating the admission, exclusion, expulsion, or removal of aliens, if he has reason to believe that the person so arrested is guilty of such felony and if there is likelihood of the person escaping before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.” 

5. To make arrests: “A) for any offense against the United States, if the offense is committed in the officer’s or employee’s presence, or B) for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if the officer or employee has reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such a felony.”

Per the code, immigration officers can arrest anyone without a warrant if officers are “performing duties relating to the enforcement of the immigration laws at the time of the arrest and if there is a likelihood of the person escaping before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.” 

When is a warrant required for ICE to arrest someone?

Aside from the exceptions outlined above under “Powers without warrant,” ICE is required to present one of two warrants while making an arrest or conducting a search: either a judicial warrant to enter private property, or an administrative warrant from the agency authorizing an arrest or seizure. 

For example, while Lander asked to see a judicial warrant for the immigrant ICE was attempting to detain at his court hearing, ICE is not required to present a judicial warrant in a public place like a courtroom. According to the National Immigration Law Center, a judicial warrant can be issued only by a court, must be signed by a state or federal judge, and authorizes “a law enforcement officer to make an arrest, a seizure, or a search of some private area, such as your home.” 

An administrative warrant (also referred to as an “immigration warrant” or “ICE warrant”) can be signed by ICE itself. According the NILC, an administrative warrant is “issued by a federal agency and may be signed by an ‘immigration judge’ or an ‘immigration officer’ (such as an ICE agent). Unlike a judicial warrant, an immigration warrant does not authorize a search or entry into your home or other private areas.” 

We spoke to a range of immigration experts who noted that while ICE can obtain judicial warrants against immigrants as well as U.S. citizens, they hardly ever do so due to the requirement of persuading a federal judge to issue said warrant. Administrative warrants carry less legal weight, as in practice they allow an agency like ICE to give itself permission to carry out an arrest. Further, ICE cannot use administrative warrants to arrest U.S. citizens. 

Benson told Snopes that while an administrative warrant should generally not be enforceable against anyone (immigrants and citizens included), it has often been accepted in many cases: 

In general, no administrative warrant is enforceable against ANYONE. But administrative warrants are frequently accepted in a variety of settings, e.g., employer enforcement where an agency is looking for wage and hours records or compliance with verification of authorization to work. Individuals who are shown a warrant should read it carefully and can tell the officer they will not comply unless the warrant is issued by a member of the federal judiciary. State judges do not have the power to grant federal officers the right to arrest.

Sarah Owings, an immigration attorney in Atlanta, told Snopes by phone that ICE has no administrative warrant powers over U.S. citizens. “A judicial warrant could be obtained to arrest a U.S. citizen, but they are not going to do that,” she said. 

One reason is because of how complex the process of obtaining such a warrant can be. In a phone conversation, Nathan Yaffe, an immigration lawyer in New York, told Snopes that while an administrative warrant could simply be signed by an ICE official, the process for getting a judicial warrant can take longer: “You have to convince the judge that there is probable cause [their] search will reveal a crime or unlawful activity.” 

However, Yaffe added, the focus on the type of warrant needed to arrest individuals is a distraction from ICE’s general practices.

“It’s unfortunate that many elected officials and people in the media are fixating on the judicial warrant aspect, because it has never been the case that ICE gets judicial warrants prior to making arrests. It is extraordinarily rare,” he said. 

He continued:

[The demand for a warrant] is founded on an inaccurate premise that ICE is operating “lawfully” to get a judicial warrant. It wrongly creates exceptionalism around this moment and feeds into the idea there is a procedural justice fix. People should be attacking ICE practices across the board and not just under Trump in that case. There is a good argument [ICE] needs an administrative warrant to make the arrest but even that practice is not a meaningful layer of protection because ICE is basically giving itself permission.

Does ICE have the authority to arrest US citizens?

ICE generally does not have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens without a warrant except in certain circumstances. Yaffe said all three of the following criteria would have to be met to justify the arrest of a citizen:

1. ICE has to be actively in the middle of performing duties related to immigration enforcement.
2. The person they are arresting has to have been committing an “offense against the United States.” That would be a subset of federal crimes.
3. There has to have been “a likelihood of the person escaping before a warrant could be obtained.”

As stated in 8 U.S. Code 1357, in section 5 of “Powers without warrant,” agents can arrest anyone “for any offense against the United States, if the offense is committed in the officer’s or employee’s presence” or “for any felony” and if the agent believes the citizen will escape before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.  

In Lander’s case, DHS sent us a statement from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in which she accused Lander of assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer. However, available footage of the arrest did not provide evidence of Lander assaulting an officer.

Despite the above restrictions, ICE reportedly detained and deported numerous U.S. citizens in 2025, including children born in the United States.  

Sources

On Jan. 11, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Brandon Siguenza, a U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis, according to social media posts.

The posts claimed that while Siguenza and his friend Patty O’Keefe were observing an ICE operation, agents pepper-sprayed their car before smashing its windows, opening the doors and pulling the two out of the vehicle. Siguenza and O’Keefe were then put in separate unmarked vehicles, driven to the Whipple Federal Building in St. Paul and detained for eight hours, according to the posts. 

During the detention, Siguenza reportedly claimed, agents offered him money or legal protection for undocumented relatives, even though he has none, if he provided them with names of immigrants or protest organizers. 

Snopes readers wrote in looking for more information about the detention. We reached out to Siguenza to ask for more information about the incident, but had not heard back at the time of publication. We also contacted the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. 

In an emailed statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said “any claim that DHS is offering money to agitators for information leading to the arrest of illegal aliens is FALSE,” and that O’Keefe and Siguenza committed a felony by “stalking and obstructing ICE law enforcement.” Siguenza said he was released without being charged.

Because we could not independently confirm Siguenza’s account, we’ve left this claim unrated. We will update this story if we receive additional information. 

In addition to his Facebook post, Siguenza and O’Keefe spoke to KARE, the Twin Cities’ NBC affiliate, about their experience. The news outlet uploaded a 17-minute video of an interview with the two to its YouTube Channel. O’Keefe also detailed her experience to the Minnesota Reformer, a nonprofit news organization. 

According to their interview with KARE, Siguenza and O’Keefe responded to an ICE sighting at East 42nd Street and South 16th Avenue in south Minneapolis. After they followed two ICE vehicles, agents allegedly got out of their cars and sprayed pepper spray into the vents of O’Keefe’s car before breaking their windows, taking them out of the vehicle and arresting them. 

The KARE interview included a photo from inside the vehicle, reportedly taken by Siguenza, of an agent pepper-spraying the vents of the car. The news outlet also shared videos of the arrest captured by neighbors, which showed the same event from a different angle as footage posted to the ICE_Watch subreddit (archived). Using those videos, Snopes geolocated the arrest to the 4300 block of South 16th Avenue, a little more than a block from where O’Keefe and Siguenza said they responded to the ICE sighting. After Siguenza and O’Keefe were arrested, they were reportedly put into separate cars and driven to the Whipple Federal Building.

Any information beyond this point came solely from Siguenza and O’Keefe’s recollection. O’Keefe told KARE and the Minnesota Reformer that while in the car, one of the agents told her to stop obstructing ICE. The agent allegedly said, “That’s why that lesbian b**** is dead,” in an apparent reference to an ICE agent’s shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis less than a week prior. Siguenza said in his post (archived) that the ICE agents drove erratically and did not buckle his seatbelt during the car ride.

O’Keefe and Siguenza both said there were many people being held at the federal building when they arrived, and that buses and vans were being prepared to drive detainees to the airport. O’Keefe said she heard “desperate, desperate crying from a room full of women,” and a man repeatedly yelling, “Let me go!”

During their eight-hour detention, Siguenza said he was given a phone call, while O’Keefe said she was not. Both said they were read their rights. 

In his Facebook post, Siguenza said he tried to request food, water and the bathroom through the intercom in his cell, but never got anywhere. He claimed he resorted to “pounding on the glass when someone happened to walk by and beg them directly.”

Siguenza also wrote that at one point, three men from DHS took him into a cell and offered him money or legal protection for undocumented relatives if he provided them the names of immigrants in the country illegally or protest organizers. Siguenza turned down the request and said he did not have undocumented relatives. 

The two were released at 7 p.m. without being charged, according to the KARE interview.

Claim:

In January 2026, the owner or CEO of Chipotle publicly donated between $10,000 and $15,000 to a GoFundMe campaign supporting the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Rating:

Context

Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager who did donate in support of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, was previously a major shareholder in Chipotle through his investment firm. He was no longer affiliated with the company in January 2026.

On Jan. 7, 2026, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, sparking nationwide protests against ICE and its use of force. The agent who fired the shots was publicly identified by multiple credible news outlets as Jonathan Ross; as of this writing he had not been charged in connection with the killing amid an ongoing federal investigation. 

In the days since the shooting, online fundraisers emerged aimed at supporting Ross during potential legal consequences.

People on social media claimed (archived) the owner or CEO of Chipotle, a Mexican fast-food chain, donated either $10,000 (archived) or $15,000 (archived) to ICE agents generally or specifically to the ICE agent who shot and killed Good. Several Snopes readers emailed us asking whether the rumor was true.

(Facebook account Ashley Jacobs)

The claim was based on a donation by Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager who previously held a significant stake in Chipotle — but no longer did as of this writing. 

At the time of publishing, Chipotle’s CEO was Scott Boatwright, according to the chain’s website.

Boatwright’s name did not appear among the top donors for a GoFundMe campaign (archived) supporting Ross, to which Ackman contributed. As of this writing, that fundraiser had two $10,000 donations: one from a Patrice J. and another from William Ackman. Boatwright also did not announce a donation to either Ross or ICE on his LinkedIn account (archived), his most recently active public social media profile.

While anyone can donate to a fundraiser anonymously, there was no evidence Boatwright had made such a donation at the time of this writing.

Given the above information, we’ve rated the claim that the owner and CEO of Chipotle donated to Ross as false.

Ackman donation to Ross GoFundMe

On Jan. 11, 2026, Ackman, founder and CEO of the investment firm Pershing Square Capital Management, posted to X (archived) that he donated to a GoFundMe campaign supporting Ross and intended to donate to another GoFundMe supporting Good’s family, but the campaign had already closed by the time he tried to contribute. In a follow-up post (archived) on Jan. 13, 2026, Ackman clarified he donated $10,000 to the GoFundMe for Ross.

At one point, Ackman was a major shareholder in Chipotle through his investment firm. However, at the time of Ackman’s donation to the Ross fundraiser, Chipotle posted to Threads (archived) that he was not affiliated with the company.

In a November 2025 Pershing Square earnings call, Ackman’s firm told investors it had sold all its remaining shares in Chipotle following the chain’s October earnings report. Pershing Square told investors that its investment in Chipotle, which began with a 10% stake in the company’s shares, was more than nine years old and that the firm had already slowly sold off 85% of its initial stock investment before its final exit.

This disinvestment was visible in the Wayback Machine’s archives of the portfolio page on Pershing Square’s website. On Oct. 14, 2025, Pershing Square listed Chipotle on the page as one of its investments. By Nov. 22, 2025, Chipotle had been removed. This change was also reflected in Pershing Square’s fact sheets for October and November 2025.

In mid-January 2026, a rumor circulated online that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security used a lectern displaying a Nazi slogan during a Jan. 8 news conference.

Users on social media platforms such as Threads (archived), Facebook (archived) and Reddit shared posts promoting the rumor along with an image claiming to show Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a lectern displaying the following message: “One of ours, all of yours.”

The rumor gained traction amid widespread focus on immigration enforcement after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, sparking protests and debate nationwide. 

Many Snopes readers reached out via social media and email to seek clarification on whether the slogan was authentic and actually originated with the Nazis.

The lectern at the DHS news conference did display the phrase “One of ours, all of yours,” as confirmed by photographs from the credible photo repository Getty Images and a video from the news conference published by the official White House YouTube channel. 

However, we found no evidence confirming that the phrase originated verbatim in Nazi Germany, as social media posts suggested. The origin of the phrase was unclear, but it did not appear to have been used by the Trump administration or other presidential administrations before appearing on the lectern. Online searches for the origin of the phrase returned only results for more social media posts claiming it had roots in the Nazi regime, without providing further evidence. Searches of newspaper archives also found no instances of the Trump administration or other governments using the specific phrase. 

DHS denied the claim, with a spokesperson writing in an email to Snopes, “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome. DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

The agency declined to comment on when it adopted the phrase in question or what inspired it. 

During the Jan. 8 news conference, Noem spoke broadly about immigration enforcement efforts and defended the agent who fatally shot Good. In response to a reporter’s question about the incident, Noem said:  

This vehicle was used to hit this officer. It was used as a weapon and the officer feels as though his life was in jeopardy. It was used to perpetuate a violent act. This officer took action to protect himself and to protect his fellow law enforcement officers.

White House officials have said Good tried to run over the agent who shot her, though media analyses have challenged the veracity of that account.

Earlier in the news conference, Noem also expressed strong support for federal law enforcement, saying, “If you lay a finger on one of our officers, we will catch you, we will prosecute you, and you will feel the full extent of the law.” 

Collective punishment

Snopes reached out to Page Herrlinger, a professor of history and chair of the department of Russian, East European and Eurasian studies at Bowdoin College, to ask about the origin of the phrase “one of ours, all of yours” and any potential connections to the Nazis. 

In an email, Herrlinger said she could not directly connect the phrase to the Nazis, but added that it “seems related to the practice (although not the explicit policy) of collective punishment used by the Nazis against their enemies” in Germany and throughout Europe. The Nazi Party employed collective punishment throughout World War II to hold entire communities accountable and retaliate against them for the death or injury of German soldiers.

Herrlinger elaborated:

Examples that come to mind: the collective retribution against Jewish communities after the murder of the Nazi official Ernst von Rath by the Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan in November 1938 – or the punishment of the family members of those involved in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler (according to historian Robert Loeffel, it was related to the German practice of “Sippenhaft,” which held families liable for the crimes of one of their members).

As far as I know, however, these acts of collective punishment were part of a broader system of terror in Germany, but not an explicit policy (in other words, collective retribution was used repeatedly but never codified by Nazi authorities, and this made it all the more powerful as a form of terror/repression).

However, Nazi Germany was not the only government that employed collective punishment tactics. 

Other historical examples of collective punishment include the passage of the Intolerable Acts against Great Britain’s Massachusetts colony in response to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, a major turning point in the relationship between the British Parliament and their 13 colonies that ultimately lead to the American Revolution. 

Historians estimate that between 1926 and 1953 — predominately under the leadership of Joseph Stalin — the Soviet Union engaged in collective punishment of perceived “class enemies,” including “7-8 million arrested, with perhaps 1 million of these sentenced to death and executed in prison or later in camps,” as well as the arrests and deportations of “Poles… Bessarabians… Volga Germans” and more, resulting in 20 million estimated deaths — or “13 million excluding peasants.”

Sources

President Donald Trump said one reason that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela and “indefinitely” control its oil sales is because “years ago” Venezuela “took our oil away from us” and “stole our assets.” That’s an oversimplification of what happened when Venezuela assumed greater control of its energy sector.

In 2007, under then President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela continued the nationalization of its oil industry that began in 1976. The Chavez administration required the foreign oil companies still operating in the country to enter into new contracts giving Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company majority control of their oil projects.

The companies that did not agree to those conditions were expropriated, meaning their oil-related assets were seized by the Venezuelan government.

“They did change the terms of the deals that they had with the companies that were operating in Venezuela,” Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us in an interview. But Vigil said the assets belonged to the private companies, not the U.S. government.

Furthermore, the oil in the ground always belonged to Venezuela.

Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, told CBS News that “the oil itself was never ‘our oil,’” as Trump said. Gross clarified that Venezuela has ownership of its oil reserves, which are the largest of any nation.

Two U.S.-based oil companies, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, did not agree to Chávez’s conditions and left the country. Chevron, another American company, did agree to the terms and continues to produce oil in the country.

But in Trump’s eyes, Venezuela “stole” from the U.S.

“We built [the] Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us,” Trump said in a Jan. 3 press conference, in which he talked about the U.S. military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

The following day, while on Air Force One, Trump told reporters, “It was the greatest theft in the history of America. Nobody has ever stolen our property like they have. They took our oil away from us.”

When we inquired about the president’s claims, a White House official pointed to the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry to support what Trump said.

Nationalization in Venezuela

In 1975, Carlos Andrés Pérez, then the president of Venezuela, signed a bill nationalizing the country’s oil industry and creating a state-run company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., or PDVSA, to completely control oil production in the country.

A New York Times article from that year said that the new law ended “more than half a century of dominance by foreign oil companies” in Venezuela, including U.S. companies such as Exxon, Mobil and Gulf Oil, which previously had been granted concessions contracts to extract Venezuela’s oil in exchange for at least half of the profits that companies made from oil sales.

Before nationalization, “the contracts that these companies had,” which were set to expire in 1983, “basically authorized them to produce oil and pay royalties and taxes to the Venezuelan government,” Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University, told NPR in a podcast interview published on Jan. 8.

In 1977, a year after nationalization went into effect, the Times reported that about 20 foreign oil companies affected by the takeover ended up being paid about $1 billion in compensation from the Venezuelan government, and some negotiated contracts to continue providing marketing and technological support in the country.

Monaldi said that the arrangement “was not controversial at all with the oil companies.”

In the 1990s, Venezuela implemented a policy that allowed foreign oil companies back into the country specifically for the purpose of increasing oil production, particularly in the Orinoco Belt region, where most of the country’s oil reserves are located. However, things went differently in 2007, when the Chávez regime enacted another nationalization plan that saw PDVSA take a minimum 60% stake in foreign oil projects in the Orinoco Belt.

At least four major international oil companies, including Chevron in the U.S., agreed to the terms of new contracts that allowed them to continue their oil operations there. “And in fact, Chevron has been able to make money after they were partially expropriated,” Monaldi said on the podcast.

Two other U.S. companies, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, did not agree to Chávez’s demands, and withdrew from the country, abandoning their oil projects and equipment. Petro-Canada, which had partnered with Exxon Mobil on an oil project in the country, also opted to pull out of Venezuela.

At the time, news outlets quoted then U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey as saying, “The government of Venezuela, like any other government, has the right to make these kinds of decisions to change ownership rules.” But he said he hoped to “see them meet their international commitments in terms of providing fair and just compensation” to the companies.

Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips ended up having to go through international arbitration to get compensated by Venezuela for the expropriation of their oil assets.

It wasn’t until 2012 that the International Chamber of Commerce said that Exxon Mobil should receive $908 million in compensation and then awarded $2 billion for ConocoPhillips in 2018. Meanwhile, the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ordered Venezuela to pay $1.6 billion to Exxon Mobil in 2014 and $8.7 billion to ConocoPhillips in 2019. 

The companies say they have been paid only a fraction of the billions of dollars they’re owed.

Future Investments Questionable

Exxon Mobil’s past experience with Venezuela is one of the reasons the company says it is taking a wait-and-see approach to reinvesting in oil ventures in the country – even though Trump has said that U.S. oil companies will now “spend billions of dollars” to fix the country’s “badly broken infrastructure.”

To reenter Venezuela a “third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here and what is currently the state,” Darren Woods, Exxon Mobil’s chairman and CEO, said at a Jan. 9 meeting of oil company executives at the White House. “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it’s uninvestable.”

Energy experts also have said that improvements would be necessary to secure future investments.

“Foreign companies are looking for an improvement in governance, the restoration of the rule of law, and an easing of US oil sanctions,” including ones levied against Venezuela during the first Trump administration, Luisa Palacios, an adjunct senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, said in a Jan. 4 blog post.

She said if the Venezuelan government can “commit to these reforms in a serious way,” leading the U.S. to remove sanctions, it’s “plausible” that in two years, oil production in Venezuela could increase by as much as 1 million barrels per day. As of November, production in the country was about 860,000 barrels per day, according to an International Energy Administration oil market report. 

Jorge León, senior vice president and head of geopolitical analysis for Rystad Energy, told ABC News in Australia that it would take 15 years and investments of more than $180 billion for Venezuela to return to its pre-Chavez production rate of 3 million barrels per day.

In the meantime, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. will take from Venezuela “between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil” that have already been produced and packaged, and “sell it in the marketplace.” Purchased at market value, the oil could raise between $1.65 billion and $2.75 billion in revenue for the U.S. government, according to CNN.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC that any oil revenue would first be used to help “stabilize the economy in Venezuela.” He said that repaying the U.S. oil companies that Venezuela still owes money is a “longer term issue.”

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Claim:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyers stopped him from leaving the country and going to Scotland for a golf tournament because he is wanted for war crimes.

Rating:

In January 2026, a rumor circulated that U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyers stopped him from leaving the country and going to Scotland for a golf tournament because he was wanted internationally for war crimes.

The rumor spread as a meme on Facebook, Threads and other social media outlets.  

(Facebook user “Denmark and the rest of the world against Trump – for world peace!”)

There is no evidence Trump’s attorneys said this or that Trump stopped any international travel as a result. Trump has not been charged with or convicted of war crimes by an international or foreign court, and as such is not wanted for war crimes by other countries. We thus rate this claim as false.

We reached out to the White House for its response to such claims and will update this post accordingly.

As of this writing, Trump has not been charged with or convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court — the primary international court that charges and prosecutes people for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. 

This is evidenced by a Reuters report from December 2025, citing an anonymous Trump administration official who said Trump was threatening to sanction the ICC if it did not amend its key statute, which would leave Trump and his officials subject to investigation by the court in the future. Snopes could not independently verify this report as of this writing, but we have not found evidence of any ongoing cases against Trump or his administration. 

The Rome Statute established the ICC in 2002 and gave it the power to prosecute heads of state. The U.S. is not a party to the statute, and thus the ICC has limited jurisdiction over prosecuting U.S. citizens for crimes. 

According to the Reuters report, the Trump administration was pressuring the ICC to drop its investigations of Israeli leaders’ actions in Gaza and close earlier investigations of U.S. troops’ actions in Afghanistan. In early 2025, the U.S. placed sanctions on nine ICC officials, including prosecutors and judges, as a result. However, the U.S. has not sanctioned the court as a whole. 

While the administration reportedly expressed concern over potential future prosecutions, it is clear that at present Trump has not been subject to any formal investigations by the ICC. 

With that in mind, Trump does not face the threat of arrest in Scotland while attending a golf tournament. The PGA Tour’s Genesis Scottish Open is scheduled to take place in Scotland in July 2026. Trump visited Scotland in July 2025, and we asked the White House on whether he plans to visit again this year. 

Based on publicly available information about his travel schedule, Trump made numerous international visits in 2025. However, his 2026 travel schedule is not completely finalized. Trump announced he will be visiting China in April, as well as the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January 2026.

Given his upcoming schedule, the idea that Trump’s lawyers are making him restrict his international travel seems highly improbable, as well as the chance that Trump faces arrest for crimes that he has not formally been accused of. 

For further reading, Snopes has previously covered reports of Trump threatening to sanction the ICC.  

Sources