ICE Tracking Apps Are Booming And Digital Resistance Teams Are Ready To Help

ICE Tracking Apps Are Holding Federal Agents Accountable In Real Time. ICE Tracking Apps Are Booming And Digital Resistance Teams Are Ready To Help

“See Something, Tap Something”

As ICE ramps up under Trump 2.0, a scrappy movement of techies is creating real-time tools to resist.

The Trump administration continues to detain, expel, and imprison thousands of Americans for the most cruel and arbitrary reasons, helped in no small part by the advanced surveillance networks provided by Silicon Valley contractors: sweeping databases of sensitive information, sophisticated tracking devices, facial recognition software, social media screening.

In response, tech-savvy users are taking to social media platforms and encrypted messaging apps to warn their communities, in real time, of encroachments from immigration agents.

Some are even going beyond that—by building their own tools to fight back.

At first, shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, these efforts took a local, focused approach: community advocates in the Long Island town of Islip crafting a live map of verified Immigration and Customs Enforcement sightings in Suffolk County, and developer Joanna Benavidez setting up a limited-access app to track ICE appearances in the frequently raided immigrant town of El Cajon, California.

From there, the website People Over Papers began tracking ICE arrests in Washington state, using a volunteer team of moderators to review anonymous reports.

Its digital map, hosted on the virtual canvas platform Padlet, now takes a nationwide view.

There’s also ResistMap, a network from the Turn Left PAC that solicits ICE agent–sighting reports via a form, displays verified sightings on a map, and allows users to opt in for text alerts.

As for smartphones, there’s SignalSafe, a mapping app that collects anonymous, crowdsourced ICE agent alerts and accompanies them with submitted photos, videos, and text notes.

The Mexican government has even launched an app, ConsulApp Contigo, that allows Mexican Americans to quickly notify their home country’s consulate if they get in any trouble with ICE, then be connected to legal help or get a message out to their family and friends.

It’s a heartening groundswell of effort, but these quickly assembled creations have their limits. It’s understandable why the Suffolk County activists want to focus their time and bandwidth on their immediate and heavily policed surroundings; it’s also understandable why the El Cajon developer isn’t spilling much when it comes to her app’s access and its name.

For all these developers, the worry of bad actors weaponizing their apps, and of ICE agents potentially retaliating against their work, is potent.

Scaling to serve the entire country also makes these efforts all the more complex. Volunteer moderators may only have so much time on their hands, and only so much ability to verify a sighting that’s been reported to them from a city that may be thousands of miles away from their remote location.

And although an added layer of bureaucracy—whether via human screeners or a Google form—may help ensure the spread of trustworthy information, it also slows things down and hampers the urgency of the effort.

For apps that work across various phones and platforms, there are all sorts of dangerous privacy intrusions; if your computer or smartphone sends its IP address, location data, photographs, or other user-identifying info to a program’s centralized server, you can imagine that Homeland Security will take advantage of that.

Just ask Google and Facebook.

That’s why another platform, called ICEBlock, is hoping to bypass those issues through ample security and automation. Joshua Aaron, a longtime software engineer and former bassist for the famed Napster-era power-pop band the Rosenbergs, is single-handedly coding and funding the app, symbolized on Apple’s App Store with an illustrated logo featuring a melting ice cube.

It’s an atypical program in many ways: It’s available for download only on the iPhone, it does not require a formal account or cost any money, it purports to collect no user information, and it offers no pixelated ads.

The basic thrust of the app lies in this limited functionality: With your iPhone’s location turned on, you can easily report the sighting of any ICE officers you spot within a 5-mile vicinity; if other app users are located within that radius and have their notifications turned on, they’ll receive a heads-up push about that spotting. (This is especially helpful in dense cities like New York.)

There are no photo attachments or voice recordings involved here, and because the app offers no storage system, reported sightings disappear from ICEBlock after just four hours.

To protect the system from abuses, users are not allowed to report sightings more than once every five minutes.

The app is also available in 13 languages, including Arabic, Nepali, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

I first heard about ICEBlock through various posts by former Rosenbergs front man David Fagin, who has been raising awareness on behalf of his onetime bandmate.

Though he’s generally kept low-key about his efforts, Aaron agreed to chat with Slate since he stands by the legality of his app (“I consulted multiple attorneys, and the app does not encourage any illegal activities”) and has engaged in some linked promotions on social media, replying to high-profile accounts who share stories about ICE outrages.

“I haven’t talked about it with anyone except for my wife and a few very close friends,” Aaron told me. “A few big accounts have reposted our links, though, which has helped get us a few hundred downloads.”

Events like the extrajudicial rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia also persuaded Aaron to bring more attention to ICEBlock. “I’m really concerned about the rights of individuals.

I’m concerned about the erosion of our civil liberties, including the lack of due process,” he told me.

“Sharing information about ICE activity, I think, can be crucial for certain communities.”

Aaron has a deep knowledge of software architecture: He created the web-hosting platform BootBox decades ago and went on to work for Apple in the early 2000s, going on to start his own tech-consulting firm, Mac Genius, after leaving the Big Tech giant.

This experience is reflected in ICEBlock’s sophisticated, simple architecture. Within the app, ICEBlock provides a detailed guide to the few buttons featured within, as well as the settings necessary for operation.

It even includes a disclaimer against “interfering with law enforcement.” (It is not illegal to report on ICE agents who are generally walking around, but it is illegal to obstruct them in any way while they’re in the middle of serving a warrant or searching a home.)

In addition to receiving updates about ICE sightings, users can get a tracking of just how far they are, measured in miles, from a purported sighting.

The wide language selection was inspired by research Aaron did on various immigrant communities, and ICEBlock appears in whatever default language a user’s phone has. And, he insisted, “it stores no emails, device IDs, or IP addresses.”

Of course, this further limits the potential for ICEBlock’s wider reach. The app is not available on the Google Play Store because its terms require that “the ID of every user be stored in a database that would make it possible for any government official to subpoena the developer for information,” Fagin wrote to me.

(That certainly has happened before.) This also precludes ICEBlock’s inclusion in any third-party stores.

Those privacy boundaries perhaps speak more to the predatory nature of the tech companies that control the bulk of our infrastructure, from encrypted group chats to facial recognition.

Apple just had to settle a class-action lawsuit over allegations that it used Siri to secretly record user conversations and transmit them to third parties.

You might as well use your iPhone to access an app that could help other people, instead.

The addition of ICEBlock to the corpus of homegrown anti-detention apps is a welcome indicator that grassroots momentum for immigration advocacy hasn’t let up.

It’s also a test, however, for the sustainability of the tech resistance under a far more aggressive and brazen Trump 2.0 regime.

At least one such effort, the sighting map JuntosSeguros, has already shut down.

The ability to reach the immigrants who most need such alerts is dependent on whether they can afford or use private American tech—and whether they even have phones that weren’t originally provided by ICE itself in order to track them.

And there will, inevitably, be attempts by ICE agents to work undercover and hijack these apps for their own uses; there’s a reason they’re already using face masks and plainclothes disguises to sidestep easy attention.

Should all these apps be adopted and used more widely, we’ll likely get to find out the answer to another chilling question: whether there’s any possible way for Americans to shield themselves from the Trump administration’s wide-ranging dragnet. The stakes are existential.

“These apps are a lifeline for communities living in uncertainty and fear of when ICE might show up to tear their families apart,” Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center said in a statement.

Downloads of apps like ICEBlock have surged since Trump took office for his second term earlier this year. Joshua Aaron said he launched the app in April as a way to help immigrant communities protect themselves from surprise raids or potential harassment.

It had more than 1 million users, he said.

While not specifying details on the total number of platforms removed, Apple confirmed to the AP on Friday that they removed “similar apps” due to potential safety risks that were raised by law enforcement. Google followed their move, saying that several similar apps violated their policies for Android platforms.

While some advocates don’t find all of these apps particularly useful — pointing to potential misinformation and false alarms — they echoed criticism of moves to suppress them.

“What really worries me is the kind of precedent that this sets” where the government can “basically dictate what kinds of apps people have on their phones,” said civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo, who works at Harvard University’s Cyberlaw Clinic.

Caraballo said outside the U.S., government pressure to block apps has been “kind of a hallmark of an authoritarian regime,” such as when Chinese pressure in 2019 led Apple to remove an app that enabled Hong Kong protesters to track police.

Bondi warned over the summer against apps that allow people to communicate about the location of law enforcement officers and specifically called out ICEBlock’s Aaron.

“We are looking at him and he better watch out because that’s not a protected speech,” Bondi said in a July interview on Fox News.

Those warnings escalated last month after a gunman opened fire on an ICE facility in Dallas. Officials including FBI Director Kash Patel said the gunman had searched for apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents, though they haven’t said if he actually used one of the apps or whether any of them played a role in the attack.

Aaron said tying the gunman to the apps made little sense because the app only works if somebody else is reporting ICE activity within a 5-mile radius of another iPhone user.

“You don’t need an app to know that ICE agents are at an ICE detention facility,” he said. “This is just an easy excuse for them to use their power and leverage to take down something that was exposing what they are doing — and that is the terror that they are invoking on the people of this nation every single day.”

He also said the app worked similarly to popular navigation apps like Waze, Google Maps and Apple’s own Maps app, which allow users to report police speed traps.

It’s “not illegal in any way, shape or form, nor does it dox anybody,” he said, adding that ICEBlock is similarly “an early warning system for people.”

Those who use the apps or other online methods to monitor ICE activity say most people who use them do so for their own safety or out of concern for their loved ones.

“People are extremely scared right now,” said Sherman Austin, who founded Stop ICE Raids Alert Network in February. He pointed to rising fears around racial profiling and violent arrests impacting families.

“They want to know what’s going on in their neighborhood and what’s going on in their community,” Austin said, describing people getting violently thrown to the ground by ICE agents in broad daylight.

Also known as StopICE.Net, Austin’s platform similarly uses crowdsourcing, but instead allows its users to track ICE activity more broadly online or through text alerts, without the need to download a separate app.

Austin says the platform has reached more than 500,000 subscribers as of Friday.

The group has similarly criticized the Trump administration for what it says are retaliatory attacks targeting those who are exercising their First Amendment rights.

Last month, the platform said it learned that the Department of Homeland Security has subpoenaed Meta for data on StopICE.Net’s Instagram account.

Austin said StopICE.Net immediately challenged the action, adding on Friday that the subpoena is now temporarily blocked and pending a hearing with a judge.

Meta declined comment Friday. DHS did not directly respond to a request for comment about the subpoena on Friday, instead directing the AP to a statement from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who reiterated that “ICE tracking apps put the lives of the men and women of law enforcement in danger” and criticized media outlets for framing Apple’s “correct decision” to remove apps like ICEBlock as “caving to pressure instead of preventing further bloodshed.”

Developers like Austin, meanwhile, say removals of these apps and other federal threats should alarm everyone.

“We’re up against a regime, an administration that’s going to operate any way it wants to — and threatens whoever it wants in order to get its way, in order to control information and in order to control a narrative,” he said. “We have to challenge this and fight this any way we can.”

ICE Tracking Apps Are Booming And Digital Resistance Teams Are Ready To Help

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