The White House posted a digitally altered image showing a demonstrator involved in interrupting a church service in Minnesota last weekend crying as she was arrested on Thursday. A previous version of the image, also posted by an official government account, showed her looking forward calmly.
When asked about its post, the White House pointed to a message on X from Kaelan Dorr, the deputy communications director, who wrote, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
The Justice Department said on Thursday morning that it had taken the demonstrator, Nekima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer, into custody, accusing her of helping to interrupt a church service in St. Paul, Minn., on Sunday. Demonstrators had gathered on Sunday to protest a pastor’s apparent connection to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Less than an hour after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the arrest on X on Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted an image of the arrest on the same social media platform. In Ms. Noem’s image, Ms. Levy Armstrong appears composed, walking in front of a law enforcement agent whose face is blurred out. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, shared Ms. Noem’s post.
Roughly a half-hour after Ms. Noem sent her message, the White House posted its own version of the arrest image, in which Ms. Levy Armstrong appears to be sobbing. Her skin appears to have been darkened. The arresting agent in Ms. Noem’s image is in exactly the same position.
The New York Times ran the image used by Ms. Noem as well as the one posted by the White House through Resemble.AI, an A.I. detection system. It concluded that Ms. Noem’s image was real but that the White House’s version showed signs of manipulation on Ms. Levy Armstrong’s face. The Times was able to create images nearly identical to the White House’s version by asking Gemini and Grok — generative A.I. tools from Google and Elon Musk’s xAI start-up — to alter Ms. Noem’s original image.
President Trump and his circle are enthusiastic distributors of A.I.-generated content, having shared dozens of synthetic images in recent years. Often, the visuals are obviously artificial, including posts in the past year showing Mr. Trump as a king and as a fighter pilot dropping excrement on demonstrators.
The doctored photograph could end up hindering the Justice Department’s nascent prosecution of Ms. Levy Armstrong.
As the case proceeds, her lawyers could use it to accuse the Trump administration of making what are known as improper extrajudicial statements. Most federal courts bar prosecutors from making any remarks about court filings or a legal proceeding outside of court in a way that could prejudice the pool of jurors who might ultimately hear the case.
Ms. Levy Armstrong’s lawyers could also claim that the photo was evidence that the Justice Department bore some sort of animus against her and filed the charges vindictively. A motion of that kind could, in theory, result in the charges one day being dismissed.
Tiffany Hsu reports on the information ecosystem, including foreign influence, political speech and disinformation
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