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 is a tech expert to help. What they found leads them to believe that Ice is gaming Google search.
Ice did not return a request for comment. A Google spokesperson said: “When people do these searches on Google, they’ll find a range of sources and information, including recent news articles.” She said Google aimed to “reflect the last time a page was updated” and that its “systems are not designed to boost a page’s ranking simply because they update their timestamp”.
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.