Coca-Cola is accused of calling ICE on immigrant workers — but there's no evidence of it

In early 2025, a rumor that Coca-Cola called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on its own immigrant employees began spreading on social media. 

The claim spread on X, Threads, Reddit, Instagram and Facebook, and it appeared to be especially popular on TikTok, where videos calling for a boycott of Coca-Cola products due to the company's purported actions received millions of views (videos archived here, here, here and here). In one video (archived) with nearly 2 million views, employment lawyer Trang Tran claimed Coca-Cola laid off "thousands of Latin American workers" at the "Cerberus Bottling Plant" in Texas and then called ICE. 

Some popular videos claimed Coca-Cola attempted to apologize for calling ICE, including a TikTok video in Spanish that received nearly 3 million views and 200,000 likes as of this writing (videos archived here, here and here). 

These claims were not based in credible evidence. We could not find any proof Coca-Cola called ICE on former or current employees, nor could we find evidence of mass layoffs at a Coca-Cola plant in Texas. Coca-Cola also denied the allegations, and there was no proof of an apology by the company, as asserted by some videos. 

No evidence to support claims about Coca-Cola, ICE

There was no proof of the scenario alleged in Tran's video — that the company laid off employees en masse and then called ICE on them — which, if it had happened, would have received news coverage from reputable journalists. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a federal labor and employment law, requires large companies to notify state government officials of mass layoffs, and news outlets can easily access those publicly available alerts.