Critics Decry Surveillance App that Tracks Undocumented Immigrants
When, in February 2018, Marco (not his real name), from El Salvador, was released from a cramped immigration detention centre in Arizona where he’d been living for five months with three thousand others — where every step was watched, every bathroom visit logged — he thought he’d finally have some privacy.
But even out of captivity, Marco was tracked. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mandated he wear a clunky ankle GPS monitor, or, in his own words, a “grillete” [shackle], for nine months.
Then in June it came off, on the condition he download an app to his phone called BI Smartlink, providing real-time GPS scanning and voice and facial recognition technology. Since then, he has received unscheduled visits at his home in New Jersey from a case officer every week.
These two alternative forms of detention make up the DHS’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, run by a company called BI Incorporated. Originally founded in Colorado in 1978 as a cattle-monitoring service, BI Incorporated was bought by the controversial private prison company The GEO Group in 2011 for $415 million, according to Reuters.
Since 2004, BI Incorporated has won over $500 million from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts, according to USAspending.gov, a government site that monitors federal contracts. In 2014, BI Incorporated announced a five-year contract for “supervision services,” which was expected to earn the company $47 million in annual revenues.
The public-private partnership is central to a concerted effort by DHS to deal with the increasing backlog of immigration cases, which passed one million in August. Of these, 384,977 were new cases from 2019, according to TRAC, a data research center at Syracuse University.
In response, DHS has looked to the private sector for new alternatives to detention, including surveillance apps like BI Smartlink.
The role of this government program is “to facilitate alien compliance with court hearings,” according to a notice on the wall of a BI Incorporated facility in the Bronx.
The poster goes on to mention a less user-friendly mission: to “allow aliens to stay in their communities” until their “final orders of removal.”
Ambien Mitchell, the Accompaniment Coordinator at the New Sanctuary Coalition, a New York-based network that supports and advocates for undocumented immigrants, expressed her concerns with this new alternative to detention: “ISAP is not a de-escalation, it’s just an expanded version of detention. They are just looking for more ways to terrorize.”
When Marco was forced to download BI Smartlink, he had to enter the contact details of five close friends or family members in the United States. Marco is concerned he might have brought others under ICE’s watchful eye, including some who are not in the ISAP program: “Since I only have a few close relatives, I had to put them all in.”
This is a worry for Mark Latonero, Research Lead for Human Rights at Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute looking into the implications of data-centric technologies and automation. For Latonero, this is not only “another data grab,” it’s also “leveraging surveillance on each other in order to control people's behavior. It’s worrying what it will do to the cohesion of the community if you have to inform on others.”
“It’s just another form of e-carceration,” said Saira Hussain, Staff Attorney at digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, who focuses on issues of racial justice and surveillance.
She said: “It puts you into a virtual prison. You may not be physically locked up, but you’re locked up in your movements and your liberty.”
GEO Group declined to comment, stating that they “do not provide details regarding functionality to the general public.” At the time of publication, ICE had not responded to repeated requests for comment.
