US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

Thousands of press releases about decade-old enforcement actions topped search results, all updated with a timestamp from after Trump’s inauguration

Dara Kerr
Thu 6 Feb 2025 11.00 GMT

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”.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google

[Irish_Dem]

1. This is one reason Trump had to get control over all govt communication.

Everything goes through him.
He will tell lies every single day and no one in govt is allowed to refute him.

[Biophilic]

2. I had no idea that a huge chunk of Americans were so willing to lie.

And lie bigly. How did this large a number of people develop with no sense of right and wrong? With no conscience? I never had an inkling that racism and hatred of other were so deeply imbedded in a large slice of the American make. We really and truly have failed as a nation.