Two videos of women being arrested at an airport are being circulated by social media users claiming to be caught by police as they return from the January 6, 2021 protests in Washington DC when protesters storm the U.S. capital. This is false: the TikTok user who posted the video later revealed that the footage was taken in November.
The first video (vm.tiktok.com/ZSc3u8Jw/) shows two women in handcuffs in an arrival hall at the airport. One is forcibly removed by two policemen as she shouts, “stop, it hurts.” The other sits on the floor and says she has children while her handcuffs are held by a policeman. The caption on the video reads: ‘It was crazy to see when we landed’. The second video (vm.tiktok.com/ZScco7jK/), with the caption: ‘A crazy sh * t we saw when we landed [Florida]”, Shows how the woman who was sitting on the floor in the first video was picked up by three police officers and removed from the arrival hall. The watermarks on the videos show that it was posted on TikTok by the user ‘@yungxleen’.
Captions on social media posts sharing the videos include: “If you came back from that DC trip and watched 12 of their ‘lives’, you posted #capitolriots #heykaren” ( here , here); Another Capitol Riot Domestic Terrorist has been arrested at the airport. CLOSE THEM !! ”(Here); “Trumps clowns are arrested at the airport” (here); “Many Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol have problems with their return home after being added to the ‘no flying’ list and some have been branded and arrested as terrorists” (here).
After hundreds of supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson, urged the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI to add all individuals identified as having the Entered Capitol building. to a no-fly list. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday also promised to take a “strong enforcement action” against rioting passengers following reports of supporters of US President Donald Trump returning flights from Washington (here, here).
The TikTok user who posted the videos of the arrest posted another video (here) in which he explains that it is their own footage that was filmed after they landed at Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida.
The user later posted an explanatory video (vm.tiktok.com/ZSc3ewJ1/) in which the text explained on the video explains that the footage was taken in November: ‘for clarification, it was taken in November. It has nothing to do with the capital. People around us said they were not wearing masks and assaulted an air hostess. ”
VERDICT
Untrue. The TikTok user who posted the video later explained that it was taken in November and had nothing to do with the Capitol protests.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.