Fact check: Video purporting to show migrants’ arrival was filmed in California

Footage of men running across a beach in San Diego was shared online with authentic statistics about small boats crossing the Channel.

Wednesday 02 October 2024 11:40 EDT

Sunset Cliffs in San Diego, California, in 2017 (Carrie Thompson/Alamy)

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A social media post from September 30 about the arrival of migrants into the UK said 59 had arrived the previous day. The user added that nearly 11,500 “illegal invaders” had arrived since the UK general election, and added a video showing a group running off a beach away from a boat at the shore.

Evaluation

Although the statistics quoted in the post match with Home Office data on small boat crossings in the English Channel, the video accompanying it was taken in San Diego, California, in the US.

The facts

The post describes the incident as happening “yesterday”, but the accompanying video itself is older than that and has clearly audible American accents.

Performing a reverse image search on a screenshot from the video shows that on September 28, another social media user posted the same video, this time with a TikTok watermark, claiming it shows illegal immigrants on a beach in Spain.

Following the name of that watermark shows that the video seems to have originally been posted on TikTok and to the Instagram story of a user with the same handle.

The Instagram story is labelled “san diego 2.0”, and the post’s HTML code suggests it was uploaded on September 27 in the afternoon (Pacific Daylight Time).

Another repost of the video – found by reverse image search – was edited together with a second video. The likely original source for this additional footage was found in a further reverse image search.

This second video, uploaded to X around the same time as the first, appears to show the aftermath of the same event and locates the incident at Ocean Beach, also in San Diego, while also showing a vehicle bearing the markings of San Diego Fire-Rescue, the local government department that runs lifeguard services in the Californian city.

As well as explaining the American accents in the first clip, other reposts of the video also claim it to be filmed in San Diego.

The PA news agency examined the coast around the Ocean Beach area, and found that the videos were shot at the beach by Santa Cruz Avenue. Buildings seen at the site on Google Street View match those seen in the second video. Photographs of the beach which were uploaded by Google Maps users also match the first video.

The Home Office publishes a daily count of irregular migrants detected crossing the English Channel in small boats. The available data for September 29 shows that 59 people crossed in one boat.

Using the Home Office’s complete dataset of crossings and adding those 59, there have been 11,670 total migrants crossing the Channel since July 5, the day after the general election.