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.
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.
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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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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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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