Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a post published Thursday on X, shared an image of the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong. Levy Armstrong participated in a protest inside a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, against crackdowns led by Immigration and Custom Enforcement. In the image, she displays a calm, neutral facial expression while she is guided by a law enforcement officer, her hands apparently handcuffed behind her back.
Just half an hour later, the White House released a similar image, but a couple of things were different. Levy Armstrong, who is Black, appears to have darker skin, and her face shows distress: She appears to be weeping, with strikingly prominent tears seemingly streaming down her face.
This is the first widely circulated manipulated image that I know of from the Trump administration that passes convincingly as a real photograph.
The second image appears to be altered, several news publications have found. The New York Times ran both images through an artificial intelligence detection system, and it concluded that the initial image was real but that the one released by the White House “showed signs of manipulation.” When asked by The Guardian whether the photo had been digitally altered, the White House sent a link to an X post by deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr that commented, “YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
The Trump administration seems to have crossed yet another line in its assault on democracy. The White House has released manipulated images before, many of them generated by AI, but almost all of them are cartoonishly and obviously computer-generated. This is the first widely circulated manipulated image that I know of from the Trump administration that passes convincingly as a real photograph. This isn’t, as the administration tries to frame it, a “meme.” It’s a new frontier in propaganda, designed to deal yet another blow to functioning democracy.
The administration used the manipulated image of Levy Armstrong in an attempt to tell a very specific story about crushing the resistance to its brutal incursion into Minneapolis.
Levy Armstrong is a civil rights attorney, an activist and an ordained minister. She was participating in a protest inside a church on Jan. 18 against pastor David Easterwood, who demonstrators alleged has links to ICE. According to Reuters, “Easterwood is listed as a pastor at Cities Church on its website and appears in public records as the St. Paul ICE acting field office director. He did not respond to a request for comment.”
While the NAACP said that Levy Armstrong and her fellow demonstrators were demonstrating peacefully, the White House claimed without providing evidence that she was “orchestrating church riots.” The altered image was meant to portray her as a cosplaying radical who broke the minute things got rough. The altered image also insinuated that Levy Armstrong regretted her actions or had lost her resolve. It invites the MAGA base to laugh at the weakness of its opponents and prompts the left to see its resistance as fragile and futile. That the White House has done this unapologetically, even when called out by major news outlets, means we should expect this problem to continue — and likely to get worse. The problem goes far deeper than official communications about ICE, though. Under President Donald Trump, many federal government agencies cannot be expected to be truthful. But it’s equally disturbing that we have to expect that these agencies will blatantly lie in order to fulfill his quest to amass power and denigrate his enemies. This is a new frontier. Never before has a government been able to willfully deceive the public with tools as effective as those afforded by modern technology. How can the public trust in its institutions if basic facts are impossible to ascertain? From what we can tell, Levy Armstrong appeared composed as she was detained, perhaps confident that her cause was righteous. But Trump’s propaganda operation wanted the public to see something that simply didn’t happen. And the people doing the president’s bidding are promising more of the same to come.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter. 
