Before a federal judge blocked Donald Trump from putting members of California’s national guard on the streets of Portland, Oregon, late on Sunday, the state’s Republican party welcomed the planned deployment in celebratory posts on social media.
“President Trump on Sunday deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon after a judge ruled that the Oregon National Guard could not be deployed to keep federal facilities and personnel in Portland safe,” Oregon Republicans wrote on their official Facebook, Instagram and X accounts.
On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.
On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the image was not a photograph of a real event in Portland, but instead a fabrication created by combining two photographs of scenes that unfolded in South America nearly a decade apart.
The image of the police officers comes from a photo of “South American riot police” that was uploaded to the Getty Images archive in 2008. A clear visual clue that the photograph was not taken in Portland was that the first officer’s shield is marked “Policia”, the Spanish or Portuguese word for police.
The description on the Getty website does not specify the country it was taken in, but another, similar image uploaded a few days later by the same photographer says that it was taken in Ecuador. The initials of an Ecuadorian police unit from that time are visible on a third photograph in the set.
The image of the fiery demonstration that the officers seem to float above in the composite shared by the Oregon Republican party turned out to be another image from the free archive site Pexels. It was taken by a Brazilian photographer in 2017.
When a Guardian reporter pointed out on social media that the image was not a genuine photograph of the generally small and tame protests outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland, the Oregon Republican Party’s X account replied: “We’re not reporters, just bad memers.”
