Friday, February 07, 2025

Lies and Illusions

The Trump administration would like us to believe it is carrying out its long-promised mass deportations, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

Sure, there have been some highly visible airplane loads of immigrants delivered to various Central and South American countries and that one pathetic raid by Dr. Phil. But beyond that, the story becomes somewhat sketchier.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that the administration is gaming Google searches to create a mirage of mass deportations. Here is what its investigation found:

  • 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.

So ICE has been updating old press releases to create the illusion of mass deportations. In fact, there simply is not enough money, detention facilities or ICE personnel to conduct raids on the scale Trump promised, so Congress would have to pass new legislation for these operations to actually occur. 

In the meantime, ICE’s disinformation campaign is having many positive impacts from Trump’s perspective — spreading fear, projecting strength, and bullying other nations into cooperating with his anti-immigrant initiatives.

NOTE: Read the Guardian report, US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations, to see how an alert immigration attorney and her tech-savvy friend brought this scandal to light.

(Thanks to Susanna for alerting me to this story.)

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Given the political situation in the U.S., I find some measure of comfort by watching movies set in Europe during the 1930s and 40s. One gem available on Amazon Prime is “Suite Française.”

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