Immigration Crackdowns Are Booming. So Is the Digital Resistance Fighting Them

[justaprogressive]

The Trump administration continues to detain, expel, and imprison thousands of Americans for the most cruel and arbitrary reasons, helped in no small part by the advanced surveillance networks provided by Silicon Valley contractors: sweeping databases of sensitive information, sophisticated tracking devices, facial recognition software, social media screening. In response, tech-savvy users are taking to social media platforms and encrypted messaging apps to warn their communities, in real time, of encroachments from immigration agents. Some are even going beyond that—by building their own tools to fight back.

At first, shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, these efforts took a local, focused approach: community advocates in the Long Island town of Islip crafting a live map of verified Immigration and Customs Enforcement sightings in Suffolk County, and developer Joanna Benavidez setting up a limited-access app to track ICE appearances in the frequently raided immigrant town of El Cajon, California. From there, the website People Over Papers began tracking ICE arrests in Washington state, using a volunteer team of moderators to review anonymous reports. Its digital map, hosted on the virtual canvas platform Padlet, now takes a nationwide view. There’s also ResistMap, a network from the Turn Left PAC that solicits ICE agent–sighting reports via a form, displays verified sightings on a map, and allows users to opt in for text alerts. As for smartphones, there’s SignalSafe, a mapping app that collects anonymous, crowdsourced ICE agent alerts and accompanies them with submitted photos, videos, and text notes. The Mexican government has even launched an app, ConsulApp Contigo, that allows Mexican Americans to quickly notify their home country’s consulate if they get in any trouble with ICE, then be connected to legal help or get a message out to their family and friends.

It’s a heartening groundswell of effort, but these quickly assembled creations have their limits. It’s understandable why the Suffolk County activists want to focus their time and bandwidth on their immediate and heavily policed surroundings; it’s also understandable why the El Cajon developer isn’t spilling much when it comes to her app’s access and its name. For all these developers, the worry of bad actors weaponizing their apps, and of ICE agents potentially retaliating against their work, is potent.

Scaling to serve the entire country also makes these efforts all the more complex. Volunteer moderators may only have so much time on their hands, and only so much ability to verify a sighting that’s been reported to them from a city that may be thousands of miles away from their remote location. And although an added layer of bureaucracy—whether via human screeners or a Google form—may help ensure the spread of trustworthy information, it also slows things down and hampers the urgency of the effort. For apps that work across various phones and platforms, there are all sorts of dangerous privacy intrusions; if your computer or smartphone sends its IP address, location data, photographs, or other user-identifying info to a program’s centralized server, you can imagine that Homeland Security will take advantage of that. Just ask Google and Facebook.

https://slate.com/technology/2025/05/iceblock-app-ice-resistance-immigration-crackdown-deportations.html