ICE Plans to Monitor Over 180,000 Immigrants With Ankle Screens: Report

ICE plans to increase its use of digital surveillance of immigrants from about 24,000 folks at the moment fitted with GPS ankle screens to about 183,000 folks, in accordance with a report from the Washington Post. The transfer will proceed to shovel cash to the personal jail trade, which has been being profitable hand over fist since President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time in January.

ICE launched an inside memo on June 9 in regards to the so-called Options to Detention program, which permits immigrants to stay out of jail or detention camps whereas their circumstances are heard. The memo ordered the roughly 183,000 grownup migrants concerned in this system, which frequently includes checking in with the courts and immigration officers, to be outfitted with screens, in accordance with the Submit.

Pregnant girls could be required to put on a GPS wrist tracker fairly than an ankle monitor, in accordance with the brand new reporting. And whereas ankle screens might sound preferable to getting locked up in some ICE detention facility, it’s nonetheless a dehumanizing course of. The ankle screens are additionally recognized to go away bruising and rashes and reportedly have a horrible battery life, making them inconvenient for folks attempting to go about their day with out being flagged as in violation of the phrases of their launch.

Because the Submit notes, the monitoring program is run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of GEO Group, which acquired its begin in 1978 by making a monitoring system for cattle.  SmartLINK, which is a smartphone app that makes use of facial recognition to confirm the id and site of an immigrant in this system, is used within the overwhelming majority of check-ins, although ICE doesn’t appear to assume that methodology is nice sufficient, given the pivot to extra ankle screens. ICE didn’t reply to questions emailed by Gizmodo on Thursday.

The personal jail trade was ecstatic after President Trump beat Kamala Harris in November 2024. GEO Group and CoreCivic noticed their share costs soar after Election Day. GEO Group went from $14.18 on Nov. 4, the day earlier than the election, to $26.48 simply a few days after the election. Equally, CoreCivic went from $13.19 to $23.94. GEO Group closed at $24.55 on Thursday, and CoreCivic closed at $19.97.

GEO Group president and COO Wayne Calabrese stated on an earnings name that he anticipated the incoming Trump administration to take a extra “expansive method to monitoring the a number of thousands and thousands of people who’re at the moment on the non-detained immigrant docket,” in accordance with HuffPost.

“We have now assured ICE of {our capability} to quickly scale up our capabilities to watch and oversee a number of a whole bunch of 1000’s, and even a number of thousands and thousands of people, as a way to obtain the federal authorities’s immigration regulation compliance targets,” Calabrese stated. The one massive drawback, because the Submit explains, is that ICE needs so many new ankle screens that GEO Group might not have the flexibility to scale up that quick, which means the company may court docket different distributors.

Calabrese famous on the decision that Republicans had beforehand floated the concept of monitoring 7 million immigrants within the U.S. with some type of monitoring, whether or not it was via ankle gadgets or cellphone surveillance. GEO Group donated $1 million to Trump’s re-election marketing campaign via a bunch known as Make America Nice Once more Inc., in accordance with OpenSecrets. The corporate contributed an extra $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee, in accordance with CREW. And it seems to be like they’re going to get their cash’s value.