The gleeful thuggery that ICE deploys in its mass deportation efforts is degrading, not just to the evacuees and Americans generally. And as we’ll soon see, ICE has been playing Internet games to make its migrant-rousting seem vastly more pervasive than it is, no doubt to try to scare as many as possible into self-deporting.
The New York Times recently reported that the US has 1.4 million undocumented immigrants who have received final deportation orders and are not complying, consistent with other accounts. It should not be controversial to remove them. An additional 655,000 have been criminally convicted or charged. The “or charged” part matters, since anyone on US soil has due process rights. But ICE is taking the position that merely having been arrested and not having a visa is sufficient grounds for deportation. And the image suggests the Times believes ICE can make possession, here incarceration, into 9/10th of the law.
1.4 million to >2.1 million does not strike me as “few”. So why does the New York Times use that word? Because the 2 million ballpark figure is well below recent estimates that 14 million US residents are in “without legal status” or temporary waiver category, and thus represents the number the Trump Administration wants booted.
But in reality, in addition to members of the PMC who want to keep their cheap picked berries and compliant nannies and yardmen, many businessmen are loath to give up low wage, no bargaining leverage immigrant laborers. So the Administration has incentives to look as ferocious and as omnipresent as possible, in part because even getting that 2 million gone will be awfully hard. So getting credit for more serves them well.
And that is what ICE is doing! In a neat bit of reporting, the Guardian caught out widespread insertions of metadata into old articles describing deportation raids to make them look current. Although the sources could not prove whodunit, given how systematic this effort was, it’s hard to think it was not an official undertaking. From the Guardian in US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations:
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 story then describes how the immigration lawyer, who had noticed ole ICE old raids coming at the top of searches, and then started systematic queries like “ICE raid Nebraska” and plotting the results on a map. She regularly found results that showed in the search results as 1/24/2025, when the actual report was from long ago.
And all were ICE press releases.
As the Guardian explained:
After dealing with all of the outdated Ice press releases, the immigration lawyer called up her tech expert friend to help get to the bottom of what was going on.
The tech expert, who likewise spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said she was initially skeptical that anything unusual was happening….
She then started a forensic examination of Ice’s web pages by inspecting the front-end code to look for clues.
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 Veteran’s 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.”
Not only did these bogus updates initially freak out the immigration lawyer, and no doubt, lots of already-nervous immigrants by making the raids appear far more extensive than they are, they also serve to crowd out reports of deportation setbacks:
CBS reports that ICE is releasing hundreds of people arrested in the mass deportation theater of the first couple weeks of the Trump admin. I hate to say that “I told you so” but… I told you so, and I told you so, and I told you so, and I told you so. pic.twitter.com/1OojhozqbU
— David J. Bier (@David_J_Bier) February 5, 2025
There have now been four days of anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, as well as in Denver and some Texas cities. With all of the Trump envelop-pushing, they don’t seem to be getting more than local-media-level attention. But this campaign is far from over. And contra Trump. Cate Blanchette, as Elizabeth I, once intoned: “I do not like wars. They have uncertain outcomes.” But one certainty is Trump will declare victory irrespective of actual results.
