Amid real ramped up immigration enforcement, community leaders fight the spread of rumors and disinformation

The ominous — and ultimately false — long message, marked urgent, warned of weekday ICE “blitzes” on Roosevelt and Cottman Avenues in Northeast Philadelphia as part of “one of the largest immigration operations ever carried out” in the city.

It began circulating a day after ICE raided a North Philly car wash and arrested seven people, which had immigrant communities already on edge.

The text, which said the raids were to take place last Thursday, mentioned a “Philadelphia Department of Immigrant Protection” — an agency that doesn’t exist — and offered bizarre advice instructing undocumented immigrants to stay home and keep heaters on to thwart “drones equipped with infrared sensors” that would be deployed as part of the enforcement plan.

The origin of the texts remains unknown, and its reach is also a mystery.

Community leaders and clergy were quick to debunk the contents of the message, but they were too late. The text had spread in at least three languages: English, Spanish, Indonesian, and Portuguese.

“It created panic and hysteria [Thursday], and it’s just making the situation even worse,” said Sinta Storms, cofounder of Gapura Philadelphia, a nonprofit serving the city’s Indonesian community.

» READ MORE: Fake ‘ICE Volunteer Corps’ truck stirs fear in Chester County immigrant community

The bogus message is just one example of the steady combination of well-meaning but often untrue rumors on social media of potential ICE raids and purposely misleading information flooding immigrant communities from Telegram to TikTok, amid real ramped-up immigration enforcement.

Community leaders, clergy, and immigration advocates who often help connect families with emotional and legal support now find themselves adding the role of fact-checkers to their portfolio of work.

» READ MORE: Police say people impersonated ICE agents on Temple’s campus. One student has been charged as the investigation continues.

Lili Daliessio, the cofounder, and several other moderators of the Facebook group Colombianos en Philadelphia slammed the “Department of Immigrant Protection” message on Facebook.

“They are attacking our community with disinformation to create fear and chaos,” wrote the group of the text. “The result is that there are many immigrants who are not leaving their homes, going to work or sending their children to school.”

Daliessio and other moderators of large community forums, including Facebook and WhatsApp groups, say they are being overrun with reports of raids in a way they weren’t in President Donald Trump’s first term. The increased vigilance comes at the heels of a real surge in immigration enforcement nationwide.

ICE averaged just over 300 nationwide individual arrests a day over the past eight years, according to a New York Times analysis. Those numbers have jumped significantly in the first two weeks of Trump’s second administration, with ICE reporting more than 1,000 daily arrests on at least two separate occasions.

Though the agency does highlight the capture of people accused of more violent crimes, people worry about becoming “collateral arrests,” which Philly immigration advocates say occurred with at least one person at a local car wash raid.

» READ MORE: Why would ICE target a North Philly car wash for arrests? Immigration experts think they know.

To assuage nerves, Gapura and Colombianos en Philadelphia have adopted a new WhatsApp policy: Don’t share reports of immigration enforcement unless verified. Members are encouraged to send information that lacks specifics to community leaders, who will then take on vetting.

“But there are other people in the community who probably have their own text group where they’re still posting these kinds of things,” said Storms, of Gapura Philadelphia.

It’s one thing to educate well-meaning individuals on the risks of spreading unfounded rumors, but it’s harder to put entire communities at ease when they’re receiving intentionally false information or harassment directly on their phones, said Daliessio and Storms.

Researchers and technologists have reported that the spread of purposely misleading information, also known as disinformation, has been on the rise for years. It can come from governments, state-backed entities, extremist groups, and individuals and spread through, trolls, spambots, and target audiences, according to the World Economic Forum.

Consider harassment campaigns through text as disinformation’s cousin. Easy to carry out with few, if any, repercussions.

Take racist mass texts that went out days after the presidential election to Black men, women, and children across the country, including middle schoolers in Lower Merion. The texts, bypassing spam filters, told recipients that they had been chosen to “pick cotton” at the “nearest plantation.”

According to federal investigators, a variation of the texts went out to Latino communities threatening deportation and to LGBTQ communities weaponizing “re-education camps.” Though unsophisticated in its contents, the messages sparked outrage. The FBI is still investigating the messages.

Professor Darren Linvill, codirector of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, said the cost of such operations could be worth the payoff for a motivated-enough individual looking to troll or for a nation-state.

“It costs nothing,” Linvill said of easy-to-buy phone lists. “And if it adds to the chaos, and if it hurts the U.S. economy a little bit more by having people not show up to work, that’s certainly in their best interest.”

Linvill said it would be difficult to determine where those “immigrant protection” messages Philadelphians received came from, nor will we truly know the scope of the campaign because those targeted are the least likely to report.

Outside of Philadelphia, the messages reached the MetroWest area of Massachusetts, which includes cities west of Boston and east of Worcester. The contents of the message were the same save for some local references and a mention of the fake “Massachusetts Department of Immigrant Protection.”

District Attorney Larry Krasner did not rule out an investigation into the source of the texts Philadelphians received.

“But without getting more specific, I suspect we would end up extraditing this individual from Siberia,” he said last week.