Inspecting fictional claim ICE agents arrested Black federal judge Nadine Ashford

In February 2026, posts circulated online (archived) claiming that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had “destroyed” their careers after arresting a Black federal judge in her driveway without a warrant.

One Facebook profile shared the claim alongside a 40-minute long video, titling the post, “ICE Agents Careers Destroyed After Arrest of Black Federal Judge in Her Driveway Without a Warrant.”

The claim primarily circulated on Facebook (archived, archived) and TikTok (archived, archived). Snopes readers also wrote in asking us to verify the claim and video.

According to these videos, ICE agents Craig Delano and Tara Schofield arrested federal judge Nadine Ashford in her driveway in Alexandria, Virginia, without a warrant, an incident the posts claimed led to a trial and a combined ten-year prison sentence for the agents.

Search engine queries on Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo returned no results for reputable news reports about Ashford’s alleged arrest and the trials of Delano and Schofield (archived, archived, archived, archived). “Nadine Ashford” did not appear in a government register of federal judges. The video that circulated alongside the claim also appeared to have been generated using artificial intelligence.

Given the above, we rate this claim false.

Stories claiming ICE agents arrested a Black judge and later faced legal consequences have circulated online in multiple forms since at least Feb. 5, 2026. The details shift between versions, including the names of the judge and agents involved, as well as the location of the alleged incident (archived, archived). One version came from a YouTube channel that said in its video description it used AI to illustrate its stories. We found no evidence that any version of the “Nadine Ashford” story was true.

Video and narration showed signs of AI

The video that several TikTok and Facebook pages shared alongside the claim about Ashford’s arrest was AI-generated.

At the start of the video, the supposed ICE agent appears to hold a flashlight or a similar object in his right hand. That object appears to morph in and out of existence as the agent’s hand moves — a common artifact in AI-generated footage.

A frame-by-frame analysis of the clip at around 9 seconds in also revealed several frames where the ICE agent’s hand was distorted in an unnatural way, another known sign of AI manipulation.

(TikTok user @news.media09)

The video’s narration also appeared to be AI-generated. At approximately 19 seconds, the narrator reads, “…gated communities in the DC metro area,” but leaves an unnaturally long pause between “DC” and “Metro.” Such unnatural cadence is typical of AI-generated audio.

At time code 4:20, the narrator reads, “Neighbors were watching and someone had already pressed record,” pronouncing “record” like criminal record, not the action of pressing record on a recording device. This error would have been obvious to a person reading out the text who understood the context, but less so to an AI text-to-speech tool.

Snopes previously debunked a similar staged video that claimed to show police pulling over a judge and smashing her taillight during a traffic stop.