A video has been making the social media rounds for the past several days. The clip shows a man with a camera confronting another man who he claims stole his uncle's pickup truck. The captions on the video are confusing. One says "Bounty Hunters are Rats." But a longer captions reads:
ICE drags his father away, but his son uncovers the thief: a ICE agent cloaked in a badge, fleeing in their stolen truck. These agents? White supremacists felons empowered by Project 2025's decree—seizing Mexican homes, cars, lives.
The clip has been shared and liked thousands of times on X and other sites.
ICE commits Grand Theft Auto...not the video game but IRL
— Devin Nunes' Cattle Dog 🇺🇦 🇪🇺🇺🇸🇨🇦 (@Kaos_Vs_Control) December 6, 2025
In LA, a man’s father was abducted & disappeared by ICE. While trying to find him using a GPS tracker in his car, they find his now stolen truck being driven around by an ICE Bounty Hunter while he is off-duty 12/3 pic.twitter.com/6e2CkLdSHq
There's a version on Instagram here which has been liked nearly 5,000 times. It was also spread on Reddit where it was upvoted 29k times on the subreddit r/PublicFreakout. There has also been some heated commentary about the clip as you can see in the clip below where ICE gets compared to the NAZIs.
This is what dictatorship looks like‼️ Project 2025 is a copy of the Nazi plan‼️ HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF‼️ pic.twitter.com/aMslW9dqCR
— Meidas_Charise Lee (@charise_lee) December 8, 2025
But it seems everyone sharing this got it wrong. The Orange County Register reports the person seen in the video is not an ICE agent but a bail bondsman aka a bounty hunter.
A viral video in which a man was accused of being an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who allegedly stole a pickup after detaining an Anaheim man actually depicted a bail bondsman who detained a fugitive and took his truck because there was a lien, authorities said on Sunday, Dec. 7.
The case was unrelated to immigration, they said.
Anaheim city spokesman Mike Lyster said the city was aware that the bail bondsman would be operating in the western part of the city on Dec. 2 to take a man into custody for whom the bondsman had posted bail...
Anaheim officials saw the live videos on TikTok and notified Pomona police, who responded to the location and confirmed it was the bail bondsman working a criminal matter, Lyster said.
So it sounds like the unnamed "Anaheim officials" saw this happen live and called the police. The police responded and confirmed this was a bail bondsman, not an ICE agent.
So the banner saying "Bounty Hunters are Rats" makes more sense, but where did the idea that this person was an ICE agent come from? I mean, it came from the caption on the video but who put that caption there? Also, notice the bounty hunter tells the person filming that his "uncle" went to jail, but the caption says his "father" was taken. So, it almost seems like someone who didn't know what was going on just added the bogus caption connecting this to ICE.
I wish I could tell you who that was and why but I haven't been able to locate the original clip on TikTok. There are several copies but these were only posted in the last day or so. The original was apparently livestreamed some time last week.
In any case, the people freaking out about this got the story wrong. ICE isn't stealing people's property. A bail bondsman was repossessing a truck from someone who hadn't paid his bills.
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