Google Is Quietly Deleting Thousands of ICE Detention Reviews

What the Research Actually Found

Muira McCammon, a professor at Tulane University's Department of Communication, has spent the past year scraping and analyzing self-reported accounts of ICE imprisonment posted to Google Maps. What she found, and published in new research covered by The Intercept, is a systematic purge.

Last August, McCammon collected 1,636 posts from 26 different ICE facilities where Google still allowed reviews. She also found 91 other immigration jails on Google Maps that had already had reviews turned off entirely. By the time her research was published, almost all of the reviews she originally collected in 2025 were gone. Today, only four ICE detention facilities still permit reviews on Google Maps.

This did not happen with a press release. No blog post announced it. No policy change was publicly flagged. Google just quietly reached into the record and deleted it, one review at a time, until nearly nothing was left.

What Got Deleted

Let's be clear about what kind of content Google decided the world didn't need to see. These weren't spam bots or trolls gaming a restaurant's star rating. Many of the posts came from people who had been detained, or from their family members trying to understand what was happening to someone they loved.

One review McCammon collected asked, in plain and clearly genuine bewilderment: "My friend's dad was sentenced to one month in jail. He served the time and then was moved to this facility for another 3 months. How is it not illegal to hold someone 3x longer than what they were sentenced to serve?" A Spanish-language review noted that "you can barely hear the detainee when you make a phone call." Others described facilities "infested with roaches crawling all over the inmates body" and staff that reviewers called "cruel and racist."

One detailed account described a facility where detainees couldn't communicate their basic needs because no translators were available, where the air conditioning ran so cold people got sick, and where the only warmth at night came from a single thin blanket. That review is gone now. So is almost everything else.

Google's Explanation, Such As It Is

Google spokesperson Genevieve Park offered the company's official line to The Intercept: "Reviews help people make decisions on where to go, and we don't show reviews on several categories of places where people go without choice." This tracks with a 2023 Google blog post that said the company reserved the right to delete Maps reviews for places people "go to without choice," listing police stations and prisons as examples.

The logic, on its face, sounds tidy. But think about it for more than twelve seconds. The stated rationale is that reviews exist to help people choose where to go, and since nobody chooses to be arrested, reviews of jails don't serve that function. Fine. Except ICE detention facilities also house the families of the detained, lawyers, advocates, and clergy who visit regularly and absolutely do have choices about which facilities they work with. Except the reviews weren't just star ratings for the vibe. They were firsthand testimony about conditions, legal processes, and treatment of human beings.

Ask yourself: unhelpful to whom, exactly? Because it's pretty clear who benefits from this information disappearing, and it isn't the people in those cells.

The DHS Answer Is Something Else Entirely

When The Intercept asked whether the Department of Homeland Security or ICE had communicated with Google about removing the reviews, Google's spokesperson said the takedowns were unrelated to any government request and were purely about enforcing company policy. A DHS spokesperson separately denied that ICE requested any reviews be removed.

Then the DHS spokesperson said something that deserves to be read twice, slowly. Asked to respond to the situation, the spokesperson argued that being in detention is a choice, citing the department's program to encourage an app-based self-deportation system. The federal government's official position, stated on the record to a journalist, is that people in immigration detention chose to be there.

This is not a paraphrase. This is not taken out of context. That is what they said.

This Isn't Google's First Favor for the Deportation Machine

If this were a one-off content moderation call, you could maybe file it under "clumsy policy, poorly applied." But The Intercept also reports that in 2025, Google blocked Android users from downloading ICEBlock, an app that used crowdsourced sightings of ICE agents to alert people in affected communities. That's a different product, a different decision, and the same outcome: information that might help people avoid or survive ICE enforcement disappears from Google's platforms.

McCammon's research frames this not as a neutral consumer-protection policy but as a political choice. In her paper, she argues that Google is "suppressing the circulation of carceral information and counter-narratives" and that the company's approach raises serious questions about "the ideology of search, when it concerns the reputation of the U.S. administrative state." That's academic language for a straightforward observation: Google keeps making calls that protect the government's preferred story about immigration enforcement, and keeps doing it quietly.