In August 2025, as U.S. President Donald Trump used federal law enforcement to move homeless people out of Washington, D.C., people on social media shared what appeared to be a video news report on Trump "ordering the complete clearance of homeless people in 50 states." The report, which was viewed more than 2.6 million times on TikTok (archived), said that "those willing to leave will receive official assistance" while those insisted on staying will be taken to prison as criminals.
The same video was liked more than 30,000 times on X (archived). The video was also shared with different graphics by other TikTok accounts (archived).
However, the video shared by these social media accounts was fake with likely AI-generated audio.
A search for the news report's opening sentence on Google did not return any results that included the report. Another search for "trump ordered clearance of homeless people in all states" also yielded no results. Neither search returned any results from legitimate news sources reporting on such an announcement from Trump.
While the video used real clips for its visuals, the voice speaking in the video was likely AI-generated. The speed of the speaker's speech and her cadence were both awkward in a way that would be unusual for a human speaker, particularly one working in broadcast news. When Snopes analyzed several different portions of the video with the Hiya Deepfake Voice Detector, it found the audio was most likely AI-generated.
The TikTok account (archived) that originally posted the video, mohbd97, regularly posted fake "breaking news" videos of the same style, in which real clips were used as the visuals for audio of someone speaking with that same awkward style typical in AI-generated voices. One of these videos (archived), from July 2025, was similarly a report on Trump announcing the "elimination of homeless people on the streets," even though he never made such an announcement.
Both the July and August videos appeared to be inspired by real announcements from Trump.
On July 24, 2025, a few days before mohbd97's first fake news report on eliminating homelessness, Trump issued an executive order "to End Crime and Disorder on America's Streets." Included in that executive order was a directive for several cabinet secretaries to "prioritize grants for states and municipalities that enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting, and track the location of sex offenders."
Then on Aug. 10, 2025, a couple of days before the other, more popularly shared video about the "complete clearance" of homeless people, Trump posted to his social media website, Truth Social (archived), about removing homeless people from Washington, D.C.
"The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital," Trump posted.
In fact, several lines in the fake news report resembled portions of Trump's post. Trump said his administration would put the "Criminals" in jail, said the operation would be "very fast, just like the Border," and that "There will be no 'MR. NICE GUY.'" The fake news report mentioned criminals, compared the operation's speed to Trump's border enforcement and said that there was "no nice guy approach."
Snopes frequently covers AI-generated content, some of which has also been presented in the form of fake news reports.