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A 2014 “Stop the Raids” rally outside the ICE Office in Milwaukee. (Photo by Joe Brusky / CC BY-NC 2.0)
Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Wilson Velásquez, an asylum seeker, while he attended a church service in Georgia. The agents tracked him down using a controversial tool: location data from his ankle monitor.
In 2019, ICE used GPS data from ankle monitors to conduct one of the largest immigration raids yet, arresting around 700 people across six cities in Mississippi. Around the U.S., approximately 180,000 undocumented immigrants are monitored through GPS ankle bracelets or the SmartLink app, which requires them to check in with their location at least once daily. This technology is part of the Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, originally launched in 2004 and expanded under the Biden administration to replace physical detention centers.
ATD is framed as a humane alternative, but its effects reveal a starkly different reality: it extends the carceral state into private homes and urban spaces, normalizing a new form of incarceration. The uses of electronic monitoring data are not contained; information gathering, purportedly a tool to reduce harm, is dual-use.
In November, ICE filed a Request for Information for biometric monitoring technologies, or the multibillion-dollar industry of technoshackles. The request seeks to expand the $2.2 billion dollar contract awarded to BI, a subsidiary of private prison company and bipartisan donor Geo Group, under President Biden in 2020. One program under ATD, the Family Expedited Removal Management program, requires one adult to wear an ankle monitor and enforces a nightly curfew.
Family Expedited Removal Management accelerates the deportation process by using expedited removal, requiring families to prove a credible fear of persecution or torture within a strict 30-day timeline. During this period, families must navigate legal screenings, seek legal counsel, and manage basic survival needs, while those who receive negative determinations have only a brief opportunity to appeal before facing removal.
The rapid timelines imposed by FERM drastically curtail access to legal representation, with fewer than 3% of participants receiving legal aid. It’s a highly concerning number given that, according to the nonprofit Americans for Immigration Justice, 92% of individuals who had legal consultations before screenings proceeded with protection requests, compared to only 43% of those without legal guidance.
This technological infrastructure is built on a dangerous premise: that collecting and weaponizing data can achieve greater “efficiency” in immigration enforcement.
Read more: In an Era of Data Sharing, Can a Real Sanctuary City Exist?
In fact, immigrant rights advocates argue, ATDs have not corresponded with a decrease in detention numbers, meaning they are not truly alternatives to detention. The American Immigration Council points out that these programs sometimes offer alternatives to release without conditions; the U.S. continues to simultaneously pursue inflated government control over migrants and immigration detention.
ATD presents itself as a humane alternative to physical detention to mask its true purpose as an expansion of incarceration, predicated on a false narrative of enforcing court appearances.
Despite President Biden’s campaign promises to eliminate private prisons, the percentage of people in ICE detention in private facilities increased to 90.8% in July 2023 up from 81% in January 2020. Instead, ICE’s digital monitoring entrenched a sprawling surveillance system that extracts data, exploits individuals and exacerbates harm.
The privatization of this issue complicates accountability. Denise Gilman, a law professor and co-director of the University of Texas’ Immigration Clinic, tells me that private companies are significantly harder to litigate in constitutional and civil rights cases. They also operate with far less transparency and are largely exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
Law professor Jon Hanson tells me that the creation of legal choices — such as the right to representation or, in this case, the option to be surveilled — “appears to put agency and autonomy in the individual in a way that erases the power and that hides the architecture. By doing that, the injustice of the system disappears…it provides what feels like legitimacy.”
Meanwhile, 90% of migrants wearing ankle monitors report physical harm, from blisters to burns caused by poorly designed devices. One ankle monitor user reported an infected blister; when he called the ankle monitor company, the representative told him not to go to the hospital. When he finally did, he was at risk of losing his foot. The company told him they would cover his medical bill if he signed a document agreeing not to sue, with which he complied. Reimbursement never came, but a replacement ankle shackle for his other foot did.
Beyond physical harm, electronic monitoring subjects migrants to constant psychological stress and stigmatization. These practices expand and disperse violence, projecting carceral space into otherwise private living environments. Prison functions are thus contracted out to the private realm and to private companies.
As architecture writer Jordan Geiger observes, this shifts prison functions into urban and private spaces, creating a public/private redundancy, an inverted panopticon in which electronic monitoring decentralizes surveillance. The city becomes the prison.
True alternatives to detention must abandon electronic monitoring in favor of community-based approaches. Much evidence supports this claim. According to an analysis of 11 years of government data by the American Immigration Council, 83% of non-detained immigrants with completed or pending removal cases attended all of their hearings, a rate that climbs to 96% for those represented by legal counsel. Programs offering legal representation and support services demonstrate near-perfect compliance rates without resorting to invasive technologies.
This data suggests that humane, community-centered strategies are not only more ethical but also more effective than surveillance systems like electronic monitoring. Investing in these alternatives could dismantle the false narrative that compliance requires coercion while affirming the dignity and humanity of those navigating immigration proceedings. It also avoids pouring billions of tax dollars to private companies.
Gilman describes government efforts to streamline deportations like FERM as self-defeating, because they only add more layers of process.
“I’m not sure what we need is more legal representation, at least without changes to the underlying system,” she says. “The government keeps making the system more complicated and frankly harsher… it’s an either/or: you can either add in more lawyers if you’re going to keep the system as complicated as it is.”
A better approach, she says, would be to streamline the system by making it easier to grant asylum, removing procedural hurdles “so that lawyers play less of a role and there’s less time someone is in limbo.”
The rise of surveillance in cities isn’t inevitable. Although ATD is advertised as a humane and necessary alternative, in reality, monitoring is imposed almost at random, based on detention and BI availability. Both monitoring and detention numbers have expanded, further dispelling the myth that ATD replaces detention. Rejecting the false promise of electronic monitoring is a necessary step toward building a just and humane immigration system.
“The larger picture is that there really should be greater consideration given to whether this kind of surveillance and tracking is necessary at all, either across the system or in any individual case,” Gilman points out. With little meaningful research to indicate that electronic monitoring is improving appearances at hearing or other outcomes, “this is really a lot of money to the private sector and a lot of invasion of privacy and very little payoff, even in terms of the government’s own stated goals.”
Think of Sidewalk Labs, Google’s short-lived attempt to realize data-centric urban spaces. Sidewalk Labs’ CEO, Dan Doctoroff, wrote in his memoir that the city, like any other product, had customers and competitors. In his framing of the city as a product, the consumers are not its users; rather, the stakeholders operating with private interests are the consumers.
Technoshackles support this transfer of power, as privacy and dignity are dissolved for the benefit of private capital. Electronic monitoring in voluntary and coerced forms represents a new kind of privatization of public space, one that erodes the boundaries of individual rights. As the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff notes, “We are not simply users. We are much used.”