As fear continues to spread among immigrant communities across the country about potential deportation by the Trump administration, the San Francisco Unified School District didn't help the situation by spreading a rumor, now proven false, about ICE agents questioning kids on public transit.

A rumor spread like wildfire among San Francisco public school families that an ICE agent, or a team of ICE agents, was boarding Muni buses and asking schoolkids for identification. And it seems that San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su blasted out an email to all public school families in one area of town Thursday fanning the flames of the rumor before it had been confirmed as fact or debunked.

It has since been debunked.

According to the rumor, a Visitacion Valley Middle School student was "approached" by a person on a 29-Sunset bus claiming to be an ICE agent who asked where they were from and if they had identification. As Mission Local reports, Police Chief Bill Scott has since reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and confirmed that there were no ICE agents on buses this week.

A review of bus surveillance footage by the SFMTA also has not revealed anything that confirms the story.

Could this have just been a Muni fare inspector boarding a bus asking for people's proof of payment and IDs if they had no proof?

The SFUSD seemed to want to show that it had sprung into action after this potential threat from ICE, but the official email spawned plenty of social media chatter that went even further with the rumor.

In this Instagram post, you can see that a person claims an entire team of ICE agents board a bus with K-9s in tow. There was no evidence of this on SFMTA video.

As the Chronicle notes, ICE officials have "previously stated that they conduct targeted arrests and do not conduct 'raids or sweeps,'" however it's hard to know what may be coming around the corner given the dramatic rhetoric of the president.

"In SFUSD we strive to only communicate accurate information and not contribute to the anxieties that our communities may be experiencing," says SFUSD spokesperson Laura Dudnick, in a statement to the Chronicle. "However, given that unverified information began circulating quickly among school communities yesterday, we took the opportunity to share what we knew at the time so that schools had consistent information."