White House Reportedly Shares Purportedly AI-Altered Arrest Photo Depicting Minnesota Protester Nekima Levy Armstrong as Crying

January 22, 2026

The White House reportedly posted an image allegedly manipulated using AI, depicting protester and attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong appearing to cry during her arrest. This follows an earlier image shared by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showing her calm.

Analysis by third parties using AI detection tools found signs of potential facial manipulation, which could be replicated using generative AI systems.

Such incidents underscore the need for trustworthy and safe AI governance. The HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM aims to manage such risks through its measures, mapping, governing, and measuring processes.
JOIN US

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
white-house, white-house-communications-team, executive-office-of-the-president
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-image-generator-developers
Alleged harmed parties
nekima-levy-armstrong, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1357

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.