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 so
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