'Creating terror': Trump administration accused of manipulating Google 'to send a message'

06 February

Since the election of President Donald Trump — who ran on mass deportations of undocumented immigrants — immigrant communities have feared increased crackdowns by the new administration. A quick Google search for arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) results in pages of press releases from the agency announcing arrests and raids.

But many of those articles, Guardian tech reporter Dara Kerr found, were outdated. For example, an operation in Colorado happened in 2010, and arrests in Wisconsin happened in 2018. AlterNet found a press release about arrests in Idaho is from 2010 as well, but the date on the Google result says January 24, 2025.

Indeed, the outdated press releases all had a note at the bottom of the page: “Updated: 01/24/2025.”

“There was a lot of noise online,” an immigration lawyer who noticed the pattern told the Guardian. “And it was creating terror in the community.” She remained anonymous out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.

“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,” a tech expert who also chose to remain anonymous said.

“It’s ICE’s made-for-TV moment,” Kerr writes.

“[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."

A Google spokesperson told the Guardian: “When people do these searches on Google, they’ll find a range of sources and information, including recent news articles.”

She further explained that Google aims to “reflect the last time a page was updated.” Its “systems,” she said, “are not designed to boost a page’s ranking simply because they update their timestamp.”

Lindsay M. Harris, a law professor at the University of San Francisco who specializes in immigration law, told the Guardian the media blitz is part of a deliberate strategy.

“All of that is intended to send a message to immigrants to be afraid and that they’re coming for you,” she said. “Regardless of the actual numbers, the optics of these mass arrests throughout the country have very real ramifications.”

Click here to read the Guardian's full report.

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