Claims have emerged that “fake asylum seekers” are being shipped into Polish cities, as part of a wider anti-migrant disinformation campaign.
Posts like these on X have been circulating widely, showing videos of a group of people dragging suitcases along a street in Kraków at night.
The captions published with the video read: “Fake asylum seekers are dumped in Kraków, Poland, at night, when Poles are sleeping.”
They accuse some unnamed authorities of being “sneaky” and wanting to destroy Poland, as well as the rest of Europe.
We put a still from the video through a reverse image search, which led us to a Facebook post published on 19 April 2025 by a public lobbying movement for the residents of Old Kraków.
It campaigns to reduce noise and the opening times of catering businesses in the city, among other issues, to keep it peaceful for the people who live there, according to its website.
The Facebook post says the video shows a so-called “hotel crawl” of about 100 people in the city at about 1:15 am.
It suggests that the tourists were making too much noise for that time of morning and that Kraków authorities should consider installing soundproof windows for residents, like a similar initiative in Vienna.
The head of the lobbying group told EuroVerify in a message that one of its members shot the video as an example of “disruption” in the city.
He said they don’t know the nationality, gender or religion of the people in the video, and that, while they weren’t particularly loud, their suitcases rolling along the street were.
“This is a disturbance of night time quiet,” he added.
Right-wing politicians at the centre
The miscaptioned video is particularly concerning because even Polish politicians appear to have shared it with the same false claims to advance their agenda.
EuroVerify contacted the office of Aleksander Miszalski, the mayor of Kraków, which said it was aware of the video and shared a letter Miszalski had written to Polish MP Anna Krupka.
The letter asks Krupka, of the right-wing populist party Law and Justice, to apologise for a social media post on 22 April in which she shared the video and accused Kraków of bringing migrants into the city “under the cover of night”. The post quickly gained traction among far-right groups.
“I formally request that you issue a public apology for spreading disinformation and constructing a misleading narrative concerning migration policy,” the mayor said in his letter, noting that merely removing the post is “entirely inadequate”.
“The video featured in the post, which shows foreign tourists en route to their hotels along Łobzowska Street, has been wilfully taken out of context and manipulated to incite fear among the residents of Kraków,” he continued.
“Such a deplorable act is wholly incompatible with the responsibilities and ethical standards expected of a Member of the Parliament of the Republic of Poland,” Miszalski added. “By exploiting the public trust vested in you, you are deliberately fuelling division, inciting hostility, and engaging in the spread of crude propaganda designed solely to secure transient political advantage.”
It appears that Krupka has removed the video from her social media channels, although screenshots of it still exist, but EuroVerify could not find any explicit public apology.
Miszalski has since referred the matter to the Parliamentary Ethics Committee due to Krupka’s failure to apologise.
“Thousands of people saw this manipulation that attacked the image of Kraków,” the mayor said in a post on X. “I called on Anna Krupka to publicly apologise. However, she does not believe that she did anything wrong…”
Since posting the video, Krupka has appeared on Polish television and said that she didn’t publish it herself; rather, it was “the person who runs [her] Facebook account”, according to national news reports.
Krupka said she told the social media manager to delete the post once she realised what had happened.
Other reports state that Krupka said she considered the matter closed after she removed the video. She did not respond to EuroVerify’s request for comment.
All in all, there’s no evidence that Kraków is bringing in “fake asylum seekers”, and the video is being shared online with a false caption that is presumably designed to whip up hatred and fear of migrants.
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