ICE moves to shackle some 180,000 immigrants with GPS ankle monitors

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has directed personnel to sharply increase the number of immigrants they shackle with GPS-enabled ankle monitors, as the Trump administration widens surveillance of people it is targeting for deportation, according to an internal ICE document reviewed by The Washington Post.

In a June 9 memo, ICE ordered staff to place ankle monitors on all people enrolled in the agency’s Alternatives to Detention program “whenever possible.” About 183,000 adult migrants are enrolled in ATD and had previously consented to some form of tracking or mandatory check-ins while they waited for their immigration cases to be resolved. Currently, just 24,000 of these individuals wear ankle monitors.

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One exception would be pregnant women, who would be required to wear wrist-worn tracking devices, Dawnisha M. Helland, an acting assistant director in the management of non-detained immigrants, wrote in the letter. “If the alien is not being arrested at the time of reporting, escalate their supervision level to GPS ankle monitors whenever possible and increase reporting requirements,” Helland wrote.

The new ankle monitor guidance, which has not been previously reported, marks a significant expansion of a 20-year-old surveillance practice steeped in controversy. While tracking devices are cheaper and arguably more humane than detention, immigrants and their advocates have long criticized the government’s use of the bulky black ankle bands, which they say are physically uncomfortable, impose a social stigma and invade the privacy of the people wearing them, many of whom have no criminal record or history of missed court appointments.

“This will be a tool used to extend the reach of the government from just the folks it can manage to put in physical detention to an additional hundreds of thousands more that it can surveil,” said Laura Rivera, a senior staff attorney at Just Futures, a nonprofit group that has done research on ICE tracking technologies. “It’s designed to turn their own communities and homes into digital cages.”

In an interview, ICE spokeswoman Emily Covington did not comment on the memo but said that the administration is using ankle monitors as an “enforcement tool” to ensure compliance with immigration laws and that “more accountability shouldn’t come as a surprise.” She said ICE still makes decisions on a case-by-case basis and officers still have discretion over which participants require tracking technology.

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The expansion will drive business to Geo Group, the Boca Raton, Florida-based private prison conglomerate that previously employed at least two of Trump’s top immigration officials and donated over $1.5 million to the president’s 2024 campaign and inaugural committee. The tracking program is entirely run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of Geo that got its start in the 1970s by selling a device farmers used to monitor their cattle.

However, in one sign of ICE’s widening ambitions, agency officials recently began looking for additional technology vendors because BI’s capacity may not be able to meet the agency’s full needs, said a person briefed on the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose them.

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Geo did not respond to numerous requests for comment. An ICE spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the agency has a long-standing relationship with Geo and is “leveraging existing vendors who have proven track records.”

The new policy has taken many by surprise. One day last week, about 50 migrants huddled in a room at an ICE field office in Chantilly, Virginia, waiting to be outfitted with tracking devices. “Everybody in here needs to either wear hardware or be detained,” one ICE official said, according to Megan Brody, an immigration attorney who was there with her client.

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Paola, 29, was told to report to BI’s office in Manassas, Virginia, last month, where one of the contractor’s employees told her she had to wear an ankle monitor due to “new laws,” she said.

Paola, a mother of two who said she fled Honduras four years ago because of an abusive husband, said she has attended all of her court appearances and complied with her mandatory mobile app check-ins for the time she’s spent waiting for her asylum case to be processed.

“Maybe they’ve taken these drastic steps because many people don’t show up to court or change addresses without reporting,” said Paola, who spoke to The Post on the condition that only her middle name be used because she is afraid of retribution by government officials. "But some of us do everything right and still get treated the same."

ICE requires most undocumented immigrants to attend court hearings or periodically check in at field offices while their cases are being processed, though the frequency varies depending on a range of factors. An analysis of federal data by the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights group, found that 83 percent of non-detained immigrants with completed or pending removal cases attended all of their court hearings from 2008 to 2018.

A small portion of immigrants who are awaiting final resolution on their immigration proceedings are enrolled in ATD, which requires them to wear a tracking device or perform virtual check-ins using an app, as well as meeting in person with case managers in their home or a BI office. Enrollments in ATD peaked at 378,000 during the surge in border crossings under President Joe Biden and have declined since then.

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ICE says it considers a range of factors when deciding whether and how to track each immigrant — including criminal history, compliance history, caregiver concerns and medical concerns — but usually does not explain why any individual is put into ATD. Since the program launched in 2004, some participants have claimed they were unfairly subjected to surveillance despite complying diligently with the terms of their release and posing no threat to their communities.

“There were individuals that should have not been in the program and should have been released on their own recognizance,” said Hector Equihua, who worked as a San Diego-based case manager at BI for two years ending in 2018 and learned about the lives of the participants he oversaw from their case files, phone calls and in-person visits with them.

Of the people the government monitors under ADT, the vast majority, or 84 percent, are required only to check in virtually to a mobile app called SmartLINK, which uses facial recognition to confirm their identity and GPS to confirm their location at the time of their check-in, according to BI’s website and ICE data as of July 12.

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Ankle bracelets are used on just 13 percent of ATD participants but have been the only immigrant-monitoring technology to grow in use under the Trump administration, adding 4,165 new people since January.

Wearing one of the devices, which are made at BI’s factory in Boulder, Colorado, is like having a deck of playing cards strapped to your ankle. At six ounces, it’s about the same weight as an iPhone. The devices are prone to glitches, have poor battery life, and sometimes leave bruises or rashes on the people who wear them, according to interviews with former BI employees and ATD participants. Michael Langa, a South African immigrant who had to wear an ankle bracelet for eight months in 2019 after he overstayed his visa, said the metal band also came with a psychological burden.

“It makes you feel like you are really a bad person,” Langa said. “It really gets into your psyche and really damages your soul.” He said his case is still active but he no longer wears a tracking device.

All of the people wearing ankle monitors are assigned a BI case manager and given a geographic area they cannot leave, which could be as small as a few-mile radius or as wide as several states. Case managers get an alert any time the person leaves this area, if the device is tampered with or if its battery runs out, at which point the case managers typically call the participant and warn them they may be violating the terms of their release. They may also escalate the matter to ICE.

In the past, people who complied with the program were generally moved to less restrictive tracking and less frequent check-ins, a federal watchdog found in 2022. Now, according to interviews with some immigrants and their lawyers, the Trump administration appears to be reversing that policy: Participants who are fully compliant are being moved to more restrictive forms of tracking with little explanation.

“Why are people any more of a flight risk now?” asked Annelise Araujo, a Boston immigration attorney who says she represents several people who were outfitted with ankle monitors. “People who have lived in the same community, in the same home, in the same job for 20 years?”

Geo Group, ICE’s largest contractor, is already benefiting from Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE has signed contracts to expand or reopen several Geo detention centers and to fund deportation flights on Geo’s air carrier. This month, the agency issued BI a one-year extension on its immigrant-monitoring contract — bypassing a planned competitive bidding process that was expected to open the program to multiple new vendors.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, previously earned consulting fees working for the division of Geo that oversees immigrant monitoring, part of a pattern of revolving-door arrangements that includes several former ICE officials who obtained jobs in the detention industry, The Post reported earlier this year. A White House spokeswoman said Homan recuses himself from all discussions of government contracts.

Geo told investors it has ramped up production of ankle monitors and is prepared to potentially track millions of immigrants. “We have taken several important steps to be prepared to meet that opportunity, and we are very well positioned,” David Donahue, Geo’s chief executive, said on a call with analysts in May.

Because each ATD participant generates about $3.70 in revenue per day, a rapid expansion could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue per year, said Joe Gomes, a financial analyst at Noble Capital Markets. An ICE spokeswoman said Congress did not allocate any money for ATD in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, though the text of the bill says it does include funding for “information technology investments to support enforcement and removal operations.”

Despite Geo’s preparations, there are questions about whether the company can meet the ballooning demand. For years, BI has limited its need for manufacturing by recycling old ankle monitors from one participant to the next, according to former employees. Much of its supply of the devices is old and in poor condition.

In addition to rapidly producing new devices, BI would have to quickly increase its staff of case managers, or employees tasked with ensuring immigrants are complying with ATD. With each case manager already overseeing as many as 300 participants at once, they are already stretched thin, with little time to attend to individual requests, according to a 2022 investigation by the Guardian.

Perhaps because of these constraints, ICE recently asked Geo to hire one or more subcontractors to help scale up the monitoring program, according to the person briefed on the agency’s discussions. ATD may grow to include a variety of tracking devices and software tools other than ankle monitors, depending on what technologies ICE can purchase in a short time frame, the person said.

Covington, the ICE spokeswoman, declined to comment on any plans to expand the program.

When Paola, the Honduran mother of two, got home from the BI office in June, her 6-year-old son asked her about the black box he noticed strapped around her ankle. She told him it was nothing serious — knowing she couldn’t tell him the truth.

If she loses her asylum case, she knows, the ankle monitor “makes it easier for them to find me and deport me.”