Does video show ICE agents chasing older woman on mobility scooter?

A rumor that circulated online in January 2026 claimed a video showed helicopter-shot TV news footage of an older woman riding a red mobility scooter fleeing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota.

A network of social media pages named either Strange AI or @RealStrangeAI first posted the clip on Jan. 18, nearly two weeks after ICE officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot 37-year-old Minneapolis resident Renee Good on Jan. 7. 

The manager of the accounts shared the alleged footage on Facebook (archived), Instagram and YouTube, with the Facebook and Instagram posts each receiving tens of millions of views. The video featured overlaid text reading, “ICE chases old lady in Minnesota.” A man who sounded as if he was flying the helicopter says, “Live chopper footage over downtown where, yes, that is a protester on a mobility scooter leaving federal agents in the dust. She’s topping out near 20 miles an hour.”

In the following days, numerous (archived) social media users (archived) also shared (archived) the clip.

In short, the clip was fake. The Strange AI (or @RealStrangeAI) user noted across its account handles and display names — including with a special label on YouTube (archived) — that they generated the content with artificial-intelligence software. Additionally, a manager of the network told Snopes via email that they use OpenAI’s Sora 2 AI tool to create the accounts’ inauthentic videos.

Signs of AI in the fake video

The fake video displayed several signs of AI generation. At the one-second mark, the Sora 2 AI tool appeared to mistakenly combine a car and a shopping cart into a single object, a common error in AI-generated footage.

At the three-second mark, parking spaces displayed illegible letters and words. Additionally, the AI-generated parking lot did not provide room for cars to navigate its many spaces, including depicting three consecutive rows of spaces that would block some drivers from leaving the lot.

Searches across Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo also showed that no credible news outlets reported on what would have been a viral moment.

Across the Strange AI (or @RealStrangeAI) network’s social media accounts, a manager of the pages repeatedly noted through bios and account names that their content was AI-generated or digitally created. For example, the account’s Facebook bio read, in part: “My content is all AI generated and edited by me.” The accounts also featured many other AI-generated scenarios, such as firefighters chasing a man racing away in a hospital bed and ICE agents running after a day care owner riding on a specialized vehicle.

For further reading, we previously reported on a similar video supposedly showing a man wearing a Viking costume using a bathtub on wheels to flee ICE agents in Minneapolis.