No, migrants are not U.N. soldiers who will be deployed to enforce the next pandemic lockdown

The claim

A 35-minute interview conducted by the ex-Brexit party candidate Jim Ferguson has gone viral across social media platforms for claiming there is "conclusive evidence" that illegal migrants are actually United Nations (U.N.) soldiers on a secret globalist mission.

The interviewee, John O'Looney, who is introduced as a "U.K. businessman," claims the U.N. is "shipping in a battalion a day" of what Ferguson describes as "young, fighting-age men" who will be deployed by the World Health Organization (WHO) when they announce the next pandemic lockdown. These soldiers, it is said, will force compliance on the population in the event of a civil uprising and will have the power to use physical force and arrest people. 

O'Looney claims these soldiers are being trained by the British Black Watch Regiment in Ukraine and Antalya, Turkey, and ferried to the UK from France. In an accompanying post on X with 1.5 million views, Ferguson argues that the same operation is targeting North America, New Zealand, Australia, and parts of Europe. 

The claim was picked up by the far-right influencer Alex Jones, who shared a shortened version of Jim Ferguson's interview in which a narrator says: "We are told that these are poor families fleeing tyranny, but there are massive amounts of healthy young men without families, and time and time again, we have seen them act violently towards the native population with very little repercussion from the law."

Screenshots of social media posts on X and Facebook (archived here, here, and here) sharing the claim. 

However, what Jim Ferguson is referring to as an "exclusive breaking" story is, in fact, a recurring claim that Logically Facts has already fact-checked on two prior occasions.

The facts

O’Looney is a prominent anti-vaxxer who has previously made false claims about COVID-19.

In January 2023, a video of O'Looney circulated on Telegram and Facebook with a similar narrative — that migrants housed in hotels by the British government are, in fact, U.N. soldiers trained by the British Black Watch Regiment in Ukraine. Logically Facts marked the claim as false as there was no evidence that supported the existence of U.N. training camps in Western Ukraine or the presence of a U.N. army.

In August 2023, the same narrative was tied into the conspiracy theory about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). This time, migrants were claimed to be standby soldiers housed in U.K. military bases and hotels to be deployed during the implementation of CBDCs to stop a public uprising. Logically Facts found the claim to be unsubstantiated and rated it as false. 

In his most recent interview, O'Looney claims he has 11 megabytes of footage and vehicle and registration numbers proving that the boats migrants use to cross the English channel are supplied by a Home Office compound in Britain. However, this evidence is not presented during the interview, and no credible media outlet has covered such evidence being brought to light.

"It's the latest twist to the New World Order, one-world-government conspiracy theory," Daryl Johnson, owner of DT Analytics and an expert on far-right and anti-government extremists, told Logically Facts. He believes the claim could be persuasive even to people outside the far-right bubble.

“It keeps reappearing to instill fear and paranoia into the population for recruitment, radicalization, and mobilization towards violence. Some will latch onto it, be motivated to act, perhaps violently,” Johnson added.

That was the case in November 2022, when anti-immigration activists barged into a refugee accommodation center in Carlington, Ireland, to berate staff members and try to film the refugees, who they claimed were U.N. soldiers. A spokesperson for Ireland's Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth told The Journal at the time that this was unsubstantiated and the refugees consisted of women, children and families – and not solely fighting-age men, as the activists proclaimed. 

The verdict

There is no evidence that migrants traveling to Western countries are trained soldiers. This claim has appeared and been debunked several times over. Since O'Looney has not provided any new evidence to support his claim at the time of writing, it remains unfounded. Therefore, we have marked it as false.