US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations [View all]
Source: The Guardian
Thu 6 Feb 2025 06.00 EST
News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens”, and in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.
But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story. That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.
All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”. The mystery first caught the attention of an immigration lawyer who began tracking Ice raids and enforcement actions when Donald Trump took office. She spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the administration. At first, she was baffled when she clicked on these seemingly new press releases and they detailed Ice raids from more than a decade ago.
So she set to work doing some digital sleuthing and enlisted a friend who’s a tech expert to help. What they found leads them to believe that Ice is gaming Google search.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google
They are manufacturing "fake news".
= new reply since forum marked as read