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A video (archived) that claimed to authentically show Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents attacking a Black church choir circulated online in January 2026. For example, Snopes readers sent us a video from the Facebook page Branson Area Breaking News that claimed to show the incident.
The video appeared to show ICE agents confronting a Black choir in a street, pulling several singers to the ground.
The caption of the Branson Area Breaking News post read:
An elderly African-American church choir blocked a downtown street while singing civil rights hymns, including “We Shall Not Be Moved.” to prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from advancing during an apparent immigration enforcement operation.
Some readers seemed to interpret the rumor as a factual recounting of real-life events. However, there was no evidence that ICE agents actually attacked a Black church choir.
Rather, the claim originated with Branson Area Breaking News — a Facebook page that describes its output as being satirical in nature. Its About page states, “We are a world renowned satirical news organization & have received many awards for our breaking news stories!”
The fictional story spread amid reports that anti-ICE protesters disrupted a service at a church where a local ICE official apparently served as pastor. Searches on Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo for “ICE agents attack Black church choir” revealed only news reports about this reported incident and no reports about ICE agents attacking a choir, which would have likely been widely reported, if true (archived, archived, archived, archived).
Branson Area Breaking News has a history of making up stories for shares and comments, sometimes relying on artificial-intelligence (AI) software to do its storytelling.
In the case of the video of ICE agents allegedly attacking a Black church choir, the video showed a blurred field that moved around the screen during the clip. This blurred field matched the movement pattern of a watermark for Sora, an AI model that adds visible and invisible watermarks to the content it creates.
(Facebook user Branson Area Breaking News)
We reached out to Branson Area Breaking News to confirm whether it used Sora to create the video and obscured the model’s watermark and await a reply.
Snopes has addressed similar satirical claims from the Facebook page in the past, including the assertion that a water tower crashed into a busy road and a rumor that red rain fell on the city.
For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.
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Laerke Christensen
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