Trump Administration Reportedly ‘Gaming Google’ With Old Arrest Reports To Create Appearance of Mass Deportations

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under the Trump administration has been pushing old press releases into Google searches by updating their timestamps in order to “game” Google’s search results to create the appearance of a wave of mass deportations, reported The Guardian on Thursday.

The report tech reporter Dara Kerr cited “thousands of press releases about decade-old enforcement actions” that had topped Google’s search results pages after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Kerr wrote:

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”.

She goes on to explain, however, that once a reader takes a closer look at each result on the Ice.gov website they will see that very few of those arrests are recent. The report continued:

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.

The Guardian’s report comes amid other news outlets reporting on some migrants being rereleased into the country after being detained. The Trump “administration has used the “catch and release” program to free 461 undocumented immigrants from custody since he took office, partly because of limited detention space in U.S. immigration facilities,” Axios reported on Thursday.

The White House, on the other hand, has been hard at work to show the American people that the administration is making big strides in its immigration crackdown. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has so far begun each of her press briefings by listing off migrants detained by ICE and detailing their often horrifying crimes.

Kerr highlighted deportations in Idaho and spoke to an immigration lawyer in the state to further illustrate the disconnect between how arrests appear online and whats going on in the real world. “Maria Andrade, a longtime immigration lawyer in Idaho, says Ice arrests have been scant in the state so far,” Kerr reported, adding:

“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 high 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.

Read the full report here.