{"id":38160,"date":"2025-02-06T07:52:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T13:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=38160"},"modified":"2025-02-06T21:03:18","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T03:03:18","slug":"us-immigration-is-gaming-google-to-create-a-mirage-of-mass-deportations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=38160","title":{"rendered":"US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a> searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include \u201cICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation\u201d, \u201cNew Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens\u201d and, in Wisconsin, \u201cICE arrests 83 criminal aliens\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That four-day operation<\/a> in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted<\/a> in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin<\/a>? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states \u2013 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 \u201c44 absconders\u201d<\/a> in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: \u201cUpdated: 01\/24\/2025\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mystery first caught the attention of an immigration lawyer who began tracking Ice raids and enforcement actions when Donald Trump<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So she set to work doing some digital sleuthing and enlisted a friend who is a tech expert to help. What they found leads them to believe that Ice is gaming Google search.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ice did not return a request for comment. A Google spokesperson said: \u201cWhen people do these searches on Google, they\u2019ll find a range of sources and information, including recent news articles.\u201d She said Google aimed to \u201creflect the last time a page was updated\u201d and that its \u201csystems are not designed to boost a page\u2019s ranking simply because they update their timestamp\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the Guardian reached out to Ice and Google for comment, some of the press releases have reverted back to their original dates on Google search. Therefore, those releases are no longer appearing at the top of Google search results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cracking down on immigration is top of the agenda for Trump. During his inaugural address, he promised mass deportations \u201cto repel the disastrous invasion of our country\u201d. Since then, his administration has touted that hundreds of arrests and raids have occurred<\/a> in places like Los Angeles and Chicago. TV crews have\u2002followed Ice agents on raids<\/a> and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, has posted videos of herself on X wearing an Ice bulletproof vest in New York City. She captioned one<\/a>: \u201cGetting the dirt bags off the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is Ice\u2019s made-for-TV moment. Inundating all forms of media, including Google search, with stories of mass arrests fits into a strategy of fearmongering, said Lindsay M Harris, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who specializes in immigration and asylum law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of that is intended to send a message to immigrants to be afraid and that they\u2019re coming for you,\u201d said Harris. \u201cRegardless of the actual numbers, the optics of these mass arrests throughout the country have very real ramifications.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A pattern emerges<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As reports of arrests poured in last month, the immigration lawyer watched in shock. Social media and listservs\u2002filled with rumors of raids<\/a> and local news programs showed Ice apprehensions in towns as small as Cartersville, Georgia, population 25,000. \u201cThere was a lot of noise online,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it was creating terror in the community.\u201d She said it was hard to separate fact from fiction, so she decided to create a nationwide map that aggregated all actual Ice arrests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of her workdays, she would sit down and start Googling \u2013 typing in searches like \u201cice arrests Nebraska\u201d and \u201crecent ice arrests Arizona\u201d. Then she would plug in other states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lawyer noticed a strange pattern. In almost every state, at least one press release from Ice\u2019s website appeared in Google\u2019s top results. Nebraska, for example, surfaced links for two press releases. One said \u201cICE executes federal search warrants in Nebraska\u201d, the other said \u201cICE fugitive operations team arrests 44 absconders\u201d. Both displayed their dates of publication as 24 January 2025 on Google search. But when the lawyer clicked through to the report, the actual dates of publication were August 2018 and June 2008, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve now done it in all 50 states \u2026 and I\u2019ve done it in multiple cities. And it\u2019s the same thing,\u201d the lawyer said. \u201cThey all had the last update of 1\/24\/2025 and they were all popping up at the front of the algorithm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maria Andrade, a longtime immigration lawyer in Idaho, says Ice arrests have been scant in the state so far. \u201cWe had one that didn\u2019t result in detention,\u201d she said. \u201cI haven\u2019t heard of mass arrests in any area at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the first result for a Google search of \u201cice arrests Idaho\u201d is a press release from Ice saying 22 people were arrested in an \u201cenforcement surge\u201d. The date of publication displayed in the search results is 24 January 2025, but the operation actually happened in July 2010. Andrade said that arresting 22 people would have been a large number for Idaho and that such incidents are extremely rare, given the minimal number of Ice agents, rural terrain and extreme weather. If so many people were arrested in one sweep in Idaho last month, she said, she would know about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf the objective is to scare people who look up raids in Idaho, that would be a good way to accomplish it,\u201d Andrade said. \u201cThat would be a good way to mislead people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Confusion and fear over Ice\u2019s operations have real-world consequences for both immigrants and other law enforcement agencies. Panic in Idaho has hit such a fever pitch that at least one local sheriff has made a public statement<\/a> trying to quell fears. \u201cRumors have circulated about ICE conducting \u2018raids\u2019 in the area,\u201d Morgan Ballis, the sheriff for Blaine County, announced last week<\/a>. \u201cThese claims were completely unsubstantiated, with no evidence to support them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Solving the mystery<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are several ways to game Google search to boost a website to the top of the results page, the most valuable real estate on the internet. In fact, a whole field is built around it called search engine optimization, or SEO. Google\u2019s algorithm works by looking at various factors on a webpage to determine if it is relevant and authoritative. Government web domains already get authoritative bonus points. Other tricks to nudge the algorithm include linking back to one\u2019s own website and updating the timestamp on a web page to a more recent date, as it appears Ice has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After dealing with all of the outdated Ice press releases, the immigration lawyer called up her tech expert friend to help get to the bottom of what was going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tech expert, who likewise spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said she was initially skeptical that anything unusual was happening. But she sorted through what the lawyer found, then she did her own Google searches targeted specifically for January 2025 and Ice\u2019s website. She also tried Bing, Microsoft\u2019s search engine. Those searches returned nearly 13,000 archived Ice press releases timestamped to 24 January 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was like, \u2018OK, this is pretty weird,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bing did not return a request for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She then started a forensic examination of Ice\u2019s webpages by inspecting the front-end code to look for clues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was interesting, she said, was that Ice had marked all of these press releases as old. The agency displayed a message at the top of every page the Guardian reviewed noting it contained \u201carchived content\u201d that was \u201cfrom a previous administration or is otherwise outdated\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when the tech expert looked at the code of these online press releases, she saw a new element had been added \u2013 a time stamp. \u201cEvery article was updated on the 24th, which was causing the Google SEO to interpret that as a recently updated article, and therefore rank it higher,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To exhaust all possibilities, the tech expert did the same test with several other government agencies. She crosschecked with the websites of the Department of Labor, Department of Defense, Department of the Interior and Department of Veterans Affairs and found no evidence of new time stamps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[With Ice,] these are old articles that are now appearing at the top of the Google and Bing search results as recent headlines, where no other government agency is doing this,\u201d she said. \u201cAs someone in tech, I would interpret that as an intentional play to get more clicks, essentially on these misleading headlines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

theguardian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cICE arrests […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":38161,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3609,2581,1418,32287],"class_list":["post-38160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-deportation","tag-google","tag-ice","tag-mirage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38160"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38163,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38160\/revisions\/38163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}