ICE may be using search engine optimization to spread fear about immigration raids across the nation, the Guardian first reported.
Google searches of ICE operations surface many government press releases with recent dates highlighting considerable arrest numbers. But many of these releases are, in fact, months or years old.
The press releases pop up on the first page of Google search results, giving the raids a false air of recency and urgency.
“If the objective is to scare people who look up raids ... that would be a good way to accomplish it,” Maria Andrade, an immigration lawyer, told the Guardian. “That would be a good way to mislead people.”
For instance, one release touts 85 arrests during a four-day Colorado operation, while another announces the arrest of 123 “criminal noncitizens” in New Orleans. Both are marked with a timestamp that reads “Updated: 01/24/2025.”
On closer inspection, however, the Colorado raid occurred in November 2010, and the one in New Orleans happened in 2024.
An immigration lawyer who spoke with the Guardian first noticed the phenomenon. In almost every state, at least one press release from the ICE website appeared among Google’s top results.
“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 told the Guardian. “They were all popping up at the front of the algorithm.”
A tech expert told the Guardian on the condition of anonymity that these old articles—some of which are marked as “archived” on the top of the ICE website—appear as recent headlines, but this is not the case for other government agencies like the Department of Labor or the Department of Defense.
“As someone in tech, I would interpret that as an intentional play to get more clicks, essentially on these misleading headlines,” she said.
Read it at The Guardian
