After a Honduran immigrant arrived in the United States in 2022, officials ordered him to use a government-issued app as part of an immigration surveillance program.
At least once a week, the immigrant, a former police officer in Honduras who was living in Louisiana, would take a selfie through the facial-recognition powered app to confirm his identity and location. By trading some of his privacy, he avoided being put in a detention center and obtained a work permit.
In February, he received a message: report to an immigration office so the tracking technology could be updated. When he arrived, federal agents were waiting. They handcuffed him and put him on a vehicle bound for a detention center, where he has been ever since, according to an account from his wife and Jacinta González, the head of programs for the advocacy group MediaJustice who is working with the detained immigrant. He and his wife declined to be named for fear of harming his legal proceedings.
The maker of the app he had used was Geo Group, the largest private prison operator in the United States. Over the past decade, the company has also built a lucrative side business of digital tools — including ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps — to surveil immigrants on behalf of the federal government.
Those products are now aiding President Trump’s deportation efforts by providing the whereabouts of unauthorized immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to legal aid groups and immigration organizations. No figures have been released about the number of arrests made from the digital monitoring program, but legal aid groups estimated it was at least in the hundreds. More than 30,000 immigrants were arrested in Mr. Trump’s first 50 days in office, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
“These are the people who are precisely being monitored,” said Laura Rodriguez, a lawyer with American Friends Service Committee, a legal aid organization in New Jersey with several clients in the monitoring program who were detained. “It’s just easy pickings.”