Misleading: This video does not show Mexican immigrants in “storage containers” in the US; it shows mobile homes at a quarantine site in China
By Ananta Agarwal and Xinyi Li
A tweet posted on March 12 claims U.S. President Joe Biden is putting Mexican immigrants into storage with a video clip showing people sticking their heads out of little windows on the doors of what it describes as “containers.”
It comes with a hashtag, #BidenBorderCrisis, and describes the situation depicted in the video as a “concentration camp.” The clip has been viewed 20,000 times and the tweet has gained 233 likes, 173 retweets and 20 quote retweets.
However, the claim that the video shows a migrant holding facility at the U.S.-Mexico border is false.
The place shown in the video is actually a COVID-19 quarantine site in Yunnan, China.
The official Weibo account of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the Yunnan Provincial Party Committee said it is a centralized isolation facility located at the Mohan Port in Mengla County, Xishuangbanna Prefecture, Yunnan. It opened in early February.
In the comparison of the photos above, the misleading video (left) shows the same objects that appear in the picture on the right from the official Weibo account of the Committee. The official photo was uploaded on Jan. 29 and shows the site still in construction at that time.
Below is another photo from the site.
This video shows a side-by-side comparison between the misleading video uploaded on Twitter (right) and a user-generated video obtained from Douyin, which depicts this quarantine site (left).
Besides the identical objects, the brand logo printed on the water heaters in both videos also matches. It reads in Simplified Chinese “顶好”.
According to reports from the official Weibo account of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the Xishuangbanna Autonomous Prefecture and China News.com, this facility was designed to quarantine people entering China from Mohan Port in Mengla, a county bordering Myanmar.
Some other Douyin users at the site also posted videos (and here) that show people putting their heads out of the small windows on the door, just like what can be seen in the video in the misleading tweet.
The hashtag #BidenBorderCrisis trended on Twitter after supporters of former U.S. President Donald Trump blamed his successor for the current immigration crisis at the southern border of the U.S.
After Biden abolished Trump’s harsher immigration policies, the influx of migrants seeking entry into the U.S. has increased, according to media reports.
Disclaimer: Although faculty members at the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong have done everything possible to verify the accuracy of the story, we cannot guarantee there are no mistakes. If you notice an error or have any questions, please email us.
Originally published at https://annielab.org on April 12, 2021.
