Donald Trump’s ad uses video from Morocco instead of Mexico

Real-estate mogul Donald Trump’s campaign said Monday that fact-checkers of its new commercial missed the point of the ad.

His anti-immigrant campaign publicity shows footage of dozens of migrants crossing over a borderline suggesting that what you are seeing is the US-Mexico border.

Luckily for us lay folks, the media’s army of Twitter users (and a few jokers here and there) chose to offer the Trump campaign a few alternative bits of border footage to use in future ads. The footage originally aired on the Italian television network RepubblicaTV in May 2014.

Earlier in the day, the Republican presidential front-runner released his first television ad, which featured grainy footage as the narrator warned against illegal immigration on “our southern border”.

On May 1, 2014, about 800 Moroccan migrants tried to cross the border into Melilla, a territory of Spain. According to the description posted by the network, the video was released by the Interior Ministry in Madrid, showing an “onslaught of hundreds of migrants to the wall that separates the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco”.

Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks told the site she doesn’t know where the footage comes from and doesn’t represent the video production company.

Statement: A Trump television ad shows Mexicans swarming over “our southern border”. Last month, the site named Trump’s “many campaign misstatements” its “lie of the year”.

PolitiFact rated the campaign ad as trousers on Fire, meaning “the statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim”. The 1,954-mile wall that Trump is proposing in the USA, if we use the same standards and if it is physically possible, would cost something like $10.4 billion.