The Guardline
While they’re not as common as reviews for cafes and dry cleaners, reviews have poured into Google Maps by the thousands for the growing network of jails operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The reviews have come from internet users sharing their often harrowing experiences in the detention facilities.
Google then purges these reviews and blocks the ability to write new ones, according to newly published research.
“Google actively suppresses carceral information, narratives, and digital trace data related to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) detention facilities,” wrote Muira McCammon, a professor at Tulane University’s Department of Communication who has been scraping and analyzing self-reported accounts of ICE imprisonment posted to Google Maps since last year.
Much of this record is now permanently deleted, erasing detailed testimony of people ingested by the U.S. deportation machine.
“Almost all of the Google reviews that I originally collected in 2025 are now no longer available.”
Last August, McCammon aggregated 1,636 posts from 26 different ICE facilities where Google still allowed users to post reviews and discovered there were 91 other immigration jails on Google Maps with no reviews.
“Google had already turned off reviews for the remaining 91 facilities,” McCammon told The Intercept. “Almost all of the Google reviews that I originally collected in 2025 are now no longer available.”
Only four ICE facilities appear to still permit reviews on Google Maps, she said.
Pulling the reviews has come with no public notice or explanation.
In 2023, Google said in a corporate blog post that it reserved the right to delete Maps reviews for locations that are “consistently unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic. This includes places that people go to without choice or places only accessible to people stationed or assigned there—such as police stations and prisons.”
Unhelpful to whom, however, is unclear: While some of the reviews in question were statements of protest that could have been left by anyone, many appeared to come from people directly affected by ICE. They described a variety of issues that would be of great material interest to anyone detained in the facilities or for people close to them.
“Reviews help people make decisions on where to go,” Google spokesperson Genevieve Park said in a statement, “and we don’t show reviews on several categories of places where people go without choice,” citing the company’s policy of removing Google Maps reviews that are “unhelpful, harmful, or off-topic.”
In the past, Google has complied with requests to censor speech about ICE. In 2025, the company blocked Android users from downloading ICEBlock, an app that alerted people to crowdsourced sightings of ICE agents.
Asked if the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, had communicated with Google about the reviews, Park said the takedowns were “unrelated—it was about enforcing our policy that prohibits reviews for places that people go to without choice.”
In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for DHS denied that ICE requested any reviews of detention facilities be removed.
“Being in detention is a choice,” the Homeland Security spokesperson said, citing the department’s program to encourage an app-based system for self-deportation.
Many of the reviews McCammon aggregated were from despairing friends and relatives.
“You can barely hear the detainee when you make a phone call.”
“My friend’s dad was sentenced to one month in jail,” read one review. “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 McCammon collected read, “You can barely hear the detainee when you make a phone call.”
Other posts reflect what apparent former detainees described as poor conditions, such as “The place is infested with roaches crawling all over the inmates body there,” or “Very bad experience i spent 2 months in this hell . . . 99% of staff is cruel and racist.”
One reviewer said many detainees weren’t able to communicate with ICE staff because of the language barrier:
I stayed there for more than a month. The food there was okay, but very unpalatable. They were all very kind. Due to the language barrier, there was a big barrier to communication. I felt that most people couldn’t express their thoughts and needs. Why didn’t they have a translator? ! Even if it’s not expensive. The air conditioner there was very cold, and many people, including me, caught cold from the cold. Even so, they were unwilling to turn up the air conditioner temperature. When I slept at night, I only had a thin blanket to cover myself, and it felt very cold.
Although Google’s stance appears to be that the censorship is based on a common-sense, consumer-centric view of Google Maps’ purpose, McCammon argues in her paper that these are essentially political decisions, made by “suppressing the circulation of carceral information and counter-narratives [and] calling into question how the company approaches the ideology of search, when it concerns the reputation of the U.S. administrative state.”
