As reports of arrests poured in last month, the immigration lawyer watched in shock. Social media and listservs filled with rumors of raids and local news programs showed Ice apprehensions in towns as small as Cartersville, Georgia, population 25,000. “There was a lot of noise online,” she said. “And it was creating terror in the community.” She said it was hard to separate fact from fiction, so she decided to create a nationwide map that aggregated all actual Ice arrests.
At the end of her workdays, she would sit down and start Googling – typing in searches like “ice arrests Nebraska” and “recent ice arrests Arizona”. Then she would plug in other states.
The lawyer noticed a strange pattern. In almost every state, at least one press release from Ice’s website appeared in Google’s top results. Nebraska, for example, surfaced links for two press releases. One said “ICE executes federal search warrants in Nebraska”, the other said “ICE fugitive operations team arrests 44 absconders”. 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.
“I’ve now done it in all 50 states … and I’ve done it in multiple cities. And it’s the same thing,” the lawyer said. “They all had the last update of 1/24/2025 and they were all popping up at the front of the algorithm.”
Maria Andrade, a longtime immigration lawyer in Idaho, says Ice arrests have been scant in the state so far. “We had one that didn’t result in detention,” she said. “I haven’t heard of mass arrests in any area at all.”
Yet the first result for a Google search of “ice arrests Idaho” is a press release from Ice saying 22 people were arrested in an “enforcement surge”. 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.
“If the objective is to scare people who look up raids in Idaho, that would be a good way to accomplish it,” Andrade said. “That would be a good way to mislead people.”So, about those "dirt bags" Noem “rounded up.” Or school busses being boarded in Texas. Or detainees being sent to Gitmo. Any reason to believe any of that happened? We saw Noem in costume; we didn’t see any arrests. A school district sent out a letter saying it could happen, no doubt because ICE had contacted them. Trump’s lying press secretary said flights had started to Gitmo. Any reason to believe any of that happened? The lies aren’t just to scare people, after all.
Yes, the misleading information is coming from the government.
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 “archived content” that was “from a previous administration or is otherwise outdated”.
But when the tech expert looked at the code of these online press releases, she saw a new element had been added – a time stamp. “Every 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,” she said.
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.
“[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,” she said. “As someone in tech, I would interpret that as an intentional play to get more clicks, essentially on these misleading headlines.”Adding, for no real reason at all:
Wait. Have @doge and Elon just been pulling numbers from https://usaspending.gov ?
Then releasing it as if they discovered it ?
Brilliant if true.
Absolutely brilliant. Fooled me.
Very Trump like too.
Any https://usaspending.gov experts out there that can tell us ?
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