The groups keeping tabs on ICE

The federal campaign to ramp up deportations of unauthorized immigrants has become a hallmark of President Donald Trump’s second term. But while Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents round up suspects, some groups have turned to technology to mobilize a controversial resistance movement.

Opponents of the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts are monitoring ICE activity, reporting agent sightings with the help of numerous ICE tracking tools that are readily available online. Among them are platforms like ICEBlock and ICE Tracker, which use crowdsourcing to track enforcement activity. Some sites even show photos of ICE officers or their vehicles.

Frustration with immigration authorities is nothing new. Civilian groups monitoring immigration enforcement efforts ostensibly intend to warn locals of impending arrests, and supporters often claim that publicizing the whereabouts of ICE activity and personnel is within the bounds of First Amendment rights. But the Trump administration argues the platforms are harmful and endanger ICE agents, and some experts say the platforms could also constitute an obstruction of justice.

The current Trump administration has significantly increased ICE arrests. At the end of September, the agency had detained more than 46,000 people, up from roughly 13,000 at the same time last year. Meanwhile, the agency’s popularity has fallen, particularly on the political left. In August, the Pew Research Center reported that 78% of Democrats have a negative view of ICE, compared with 21% of Republican respondents. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, called the agency “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” Other liberal leaders, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have told voters that “we got to figure out a way to stop ICE.”

Demonstrations against the immigration agency have increasingly turned violent. During an October riot in Chicago, several protesters rammed their cars into ICE agents’ vehicles. Trump claimed in a September executive order that ICE personnel face a “1,000% increase in assaults.” Perhaps more than ever before, criminals have incentive to obstruct ICE. Mexican cartels have communicated with “U.S.-based sympathetics” and promised bounties for doxxing, assaulting, and assassinating ICE agents, the Department of Homeland Security said in mid-October.

“It’s not just the agents themselves who might be subject to some kind of harassment or violence but potentially their family members as well,” said Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Mehlman said monitoring immigration enforcement activity and posting about it on community forums takes protesting “to a whole new level.”

One site, ICE Tracker, keeps a running tally of deportations, arrests, and detentions. It also allows visitors to report agent sightings and pinpoints where arrests occur on a map. People Over Papers launched ICEOut.org, which shows photos and locations of ICE officers, earlier this month after virtual bulletin board platform Padlet took down the group’s original posting.

Some groups rely on social media to spread the word about immigration officers in the area. The California-based Unión del Barrio organizes “community patrols” to keep an eye out for agents. One such Los Angeles group, Harbor Area Peace Patrol, regularly posts license plate numbers of suspected ICE personnel vehicles on social media.

“By patrolling and ‘clearing’ areas of ICE presence,” the Peace Patrol wrote in a Sept. 1 Instagram post, “we help our immigrant neighbors know when and where it is safe to be so they can go to work, take their children to school, and continue to be part of our communities.”

Last week, a group of hackers took the activism to a more extreme and troubling level, posting the names and personal information online of ICE agents and other federal officials.

Officials have attempted to crack down on social media accounts that publicize ICE activity. In September, a federal grand jury indicted three women for following an ICE agent to his home while livestreaming on Instagram.

On Sept. 3, Meta announced that it had been subpoenaed for data on the Instagram account for Stop ICE, a website that allows members to send alerts about agent sightings. A judge later ordered Meta not to disclose account owners’ personal information.

In an Oct. 14 X post, U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said Facebook took down a page that doxxed agents, though she did not name the account. “The wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs,” she said.

In early October, ICEBlock announced Apple had removed it from the App Store “following pressure from the Trump administration.” A statement on ICEBlock’s website encouraged existing users not to delete the app, since it’s still functional, and pledged to to fight the takedown. “ICEBlock is no different from crowdsourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple’s own Maps app, implements as part of its core services,” it said.

But Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, says ICEBlock differs from Waze, a navigation app that notifies users of police presence along their route. “[Waze] encourages you to follow the law,” Arthur said. “In the other instance, you’re already not following the law.”

According to Arthur, these tracking tools may violate immigration law. “A person is in the act of committing a crime if they enter the United States illegally, and by notifying them [about ICE arrests], you are shielding them from detection for that ongoing offense,” he said.

Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that reporting ICE sightings is well within a person’s constitutional rights. As long as the bystander doesn’t physically interfere with the officer, “generally speaking, people have a First Amendment right to record law enforcement officers out in public,” Cope said. But a court needs to weigh in as to how the right to record an officer pertains to ICE personnel, she added.

Cope argued that community boards listing ICE presence aren’t the problem. “If someone … takes that information and does something that actually violates the law, then that’s the person who needs to be punished,” she said.

But Arthur said that ICE tracking tools facilitate lawbreaking by design. “These apps have two purposes: one is to warn individuals, to shield them from detection if they’re here in the United States unlawfully,” he said. “The other one would be to encourage others or to aid others in obstructing through force immigration officers.”

Last month, a sniper opened fire on an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees and wounding another. According to Marcos Charles, ICE’s acting executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations, apps and tracking tools aided the shooter.

“Anyone who creates or distributes these apps are well aware of the danger they are exposing law enforcement to,” said Charles at a news conference following the incident. “It’s no different than giving a hitman the location of their intended target.”