By Matthew Gault Published February 6, 2025 | Comments (1) | The New York City Fugitive Operations Team, joined by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, conducted targeted enforcement operations on January 28, 2025, resulting in the arrest of an illegal Dominican national. ICE photo. A search for ICE operations or ICE raids on Google gives back a staggering amount of returns. While its true that ICE has been busy since Trump took office, Google would have you believe that it did more than 300 busts on January 24, 2025, just four days after Trump took office. However, clicking through to the release itself often reveals a raid that took place years ago, some as far back as 2008. The results are most striking when you search for a specific state. Looking at Texas, Google tells me that ICE executes federal criminal search warrant in North Texas on January 24. Click through and the story is from 2019. Another, also dated in January, tells me that South Carolina will be getting additional benefits and support from ICE. Click through and its from 2011. Looking for raids in Nebraska, Google tells me that ICE published a press release about the arrest of 44 people it swept up in an operation on January 24, 2025. It happened in 2008. As first reported by The Guardian these old stories have been pushed to the top of Google search results, mixing with the very real stories of recent ICE raids and operations across the country. A closer look at the old ICE press releases shows that each got a small update around the 24th of January. Sometime on that date, each story got a red-tinged banner at the top indicating it had been archived. In an effort to keep ICE.gov current, the archive contains content from a previous administration or is otherwise outdated, the banner says. This information is archived and not reflective of current practice. Theres also a small note at the bottom of each page that says it was updated on January 24, 2025. Looking at the archived version of the stories on the Wayback Machine reveals that the banner and date werent present on the press releases on January 23rd. Thats all well and good, websites mark old stories all the time to indicate that theyre old. Attached to the new banner is also a new bit of HTML on each old release. Updated: <time datetime=2025-01-24T15:28:00-05:00 title=01/24/2025>01/24/2025</time>, which would make Google see the stories as recently changed. Google weighs recency when it ranks stories in search results, but its not the only factor nor the determining one. However, its confusing to search for information about current ICE raids and see old press releases dated January 24, 2025, in a Google result, with no indication its an old story.At first blush, it looks like ICE is juicing public perception by updating old stories with new HTML. The truth is probably stupider. Looking at the HTML for these stories in the Wayback Machine shows that theyve been edited before in the same way, on November 18, 2024. Also, this happened to every single ICE press release, not just those about arrests. Stories about ICE-related COVID-19 protections, I-9 policies, and responses to old Washington Post stories are mixed in.I went back through the HTML of old press releases from other government websites, those that still exist. Old releases from the Department of Defense havent been updated at all. Old Department of Labor press releases do have a banner marked January 20 that indicates they may contain outdated information but theres no timestamp in the HTML, not even one from when they were first published. Department of Agriculture press releases, like those for the Pentagon, havent been altered in any way. A site specific search of www.ice.gov for Updated: 01/24/2025 returns more than 300 results. Many of these are old raids, some decades old, and now theyre mixed in with the very real news of the current arrests and dated in Google search as if they happened four days after Trumps inauguration. In some cases, these results are buried deep beneath the churn of local news. In other cases, theyre the first result at the top of the page. Its confusing.The mix of old and new information, free of context, contributes to the breakdown of the information space were all experiencing. As Musk roots through the federal government and Trump suggests even more grand and bizarre policies, its important to be able to reliably hunt for current news. ICE, and Googles systems, have made it hard to do that.The explanation here is very straightforward: the website in question added an archived content bar to many of its press releases from 2024 and before (on a variety of topics), which is why the dates were updated in Search, as they were on other search engines as well. Our systems are not designed to boost a pages ranking simply because a timestamp is updated, and when people do these Searches on Google, they find a range of sources including recent news articles, a Google spokesperson told Gizmodo.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Passant Rabie Published February 6, 2025 By Matt Novak Published February 6, 2025 By Lucas Ropek Published February 5, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published February 5, 2025 By Matt Novak Published February 5, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published February 5, 2025