The Washington Post exclusively reported on the 24th that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a memorandum on June 9 this year, instructing agents around the country to expand 24-hour monitoring and all immigrants included in the “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) program must wear electronic anklets with GPS positioning function. According to statistics, about 183,000 people participated in the “Alternatives to Detention” program.
The tracking program named “Alternatives to Detention” allows undocumented immigrants facing deportation to avoid living in detention centers, but they must reply to messages at any time through monitoring facilities to confirm their location, otherwise they will face punishment.
The report pointed out that currently only 24,000 immigrants in the “Alternatives to Detention” program use electronic anklets.
“This will be a tool that allows the government to extend its surveillance from those who are actually detained to hundreds of thousands of additional people,” said Laura Rivera, a senior attorney at Just Futures, a nonprofit organization that has studied ICE’s tracking and surveillance technology. She said the design of the electronic anklets is to turn the neighborhoods and homes of those who wear them into “digital cages.”
In a letter to her staff, Dawnisha M. Helland, acting assistant director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s non-detained immigration division, said pregnant women can be exempted from wearing electronic anklets and wear tracking bracelets instead.
In the letter, Helland wrote that foreign nationals who are not arrested during regular reporting should be required to increase the level of monitoring, wear electronic anklets with global positioning system (GPS) functions, and expand reporting requirements.
The new rules announced by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement are equivalent to expanding the 20-year-old surveillance program, but the means are controversial.
The report pointed out that compared with living in a detention center, electronic anklets are a cheaper and more humane means of monitoring, but immigrants and immigrant rights advocacy organizations said that the black electronic anklets are bulky, uncomfortable, stigmatizing, and invading privacy. The advocacy organization said that many immigrants who were required to wear electronic anklets had no criminal record and never missed court hearings.
Geo Group, a private prison and correctional facility management company headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, has products used by immigration agencies and will see a boom in business as the federal government expands the use of electronic anklets.
