Why more immigrants are being tracked with ankle monitors – and who profits

0:02Paola is a mother of two. She's 29 years old and from Honduras. And last month, she was told to report to an ICE contractor's office in Virginia. That's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She didn't know what to expect. She said they don't tell you why you have to go.

0:32She said the majority of people tell you that maybe you shouldn't show up because they could deport you or something. Up until this point, Paola thought she'd been doing everything right. She left Honduras in 2021 to escape an abusive husband. She said he was on drugs, alcohol and all of that.

1:04Last time we saw each other, he tried to kill my boy and me. So Paola fled to the United States. She crossed the border and filed an asylum claim. And as she's waited, she's gone to all of her court appointments. She's done mandatory mobile app check-ins. Anything the government asked her to do, she did. So that's why, when she was called into this Virginia office, she felt like she had to go. So she was in this office with about 50 other people who were all in a similar position to her. They didn't really know why they were there. That's Doug McMillan, a corporate accountability reporter for The Post.

1:46He and her colleague Sylvia Foster-Frau spoke with Paola last month about her experience. And we should say we're calling Paola by her middle name because she's afraid of government retribution. Eventually they called her back and they told her that she had to get outfitted with an ankle monitor, which would track her every movement and also limit her geographical location to Virginia, Maryland and D.C. And basically every time they told her that she left those areas, that her device would send a ping to her case manager, who would then call her and warn her she was violating the terms of a release, or they could potentially escalate the matter to ICE.

2:33Paola said she was surprised by this new level of surveillance, an ankle monitor. Most of the time, people who follow the rules tend to get less and less invasive tracking to where the point where she was only required at that point to check in physically in person once a year. And so she thought that she was on the right track. And so her biggest confusion around this was why they suddenly were putting this ankle monitor on her and why they suddenly needed to track her more invasively.

3:08Paola is one of tens of thousands of immigrants now facing more government surveillance. It's part of a new policy from ICE that Doug and his colleagues just uncovered to shackle way more immigrants with GPS ankle monitors than ever before. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Elahe Izadi. It's Wednesday, July 30th. Today, Doug takes us inside ICE's controversial surveillance program and the company that stands to profit.

3:51Hi, Doug. Thanks for joining me in the studio today. Thanks for having me. Before we get further into this new policy from ICE, which you and your colleagues have uncovered and reported on and brought to light for the first time in the public, I want to learn a little bit more about Paola. By this point, she's now been wearing this ankle monitor for about a month. So what has this been like for her? So my colleague, Sylvia Foster-Frau, interviewed her in Spanish, and she told her that this immediately had a negative impact on her life. Her kids and her family and her friends immediately wanted to know what this device was.

4:28her six-year-old son, you know, questioned, what is this thing? And she kind of brushed it off and told him it's not a big deal, don't worry about it. Es tanto complicado explicarle porque igual no va a entender. She said it's too complicated to explain for him to understand. But she knew that having this device on her was a really big deal because it would give the government not only a control over her life and surveillance into her everyday movements, but would also give the government the ability to quickly find her if and when they decided to deport her.

5:09So it's suddenly this kind of ominous thing strapped to her leg that served as a constant reminder of the fact that she could be deported at any minute. Paola also told us that it's just not a comfortable thing to have strapped to your ankle. It's heavy, it's bulky. She has to wear it all the time, even in the shower.

5:40She said it made her foot swell. And then there's also this stigma about it. She works at McDonald's and she's getting looks from her colleagues and looks from her customers at McDonald's. She's tried to hide this device. She says that it changed her sense of fashion. She now has to buy more pants and more large kind of bulky pants that cover this thing. Because I think like the subtext here is there's sort of a connotation of if you're wearing this, then somehow you've been found guilty of a crime or something. Right, which is not the case. And I think that the people who wear these, who are not convicted of any crimes, who are just waiting out their immigration cases to be processed, feel that they're being unfairly stigmatized and unfairly labeled as criminals.

6:29And that is definitely the experience Paola has had just in the first few weeks of having to wear this out in the world and having to wear it to her job at McDonald's and even having to wear it at home with her kids.

6:45So as I mentioned, there's this new policy from ICE and how immigrants are tracked. But just more broadly speaking, what is the status quo? Like who is ICE tracking and how are they doing this? So there are nearly 8 million people who are waiting out their cases to be resolved who are not detained. and among those a very small portion about 180 ,000 are in a program called Alternatives to Detention and there's not a whole lot of transparency into who gets placed into this program and why ICE tells us that they choose the people who may have criminal histories people who may have some kind of an illness or a health issue that may prevent them from going into detention, or they may have some other reason they can't be in detention, but in the view of the government, they should be.

7:42And they have put these people in this monitoring program called Alternatives to Detention. Within that group, there's a small portion, currently about 24 ,000 people, who are on the ankle monitors. And basically, ICE has decided that all the people in the alternatives to detention program will be put on an ankle monitor. Previously, only a small portion, only about 10 or 13 percent of the people in this program were on the actual physical tracking device. The rest of them were just checking into a mobile app, which communicates their location and takes a quick selfie and verifies it at the time with facial recognition.

8:19So now, potentially all 183 ,000 of these people are going to have to come into a field office and have one of these shackles with GPS tracking technology on it, put on their ankle or on their wrist and have their location monitored all the time. How did you and your colleagues find out about this? Because there wasn't like a public announcement about it. So we have heard, we've been covering what's happening with immigration enforcement in this country for the past several months. And we've heard from many immigration attorneys who are starting to see this play out with some of their clients that they're being called into the office unexpectedly and being moved to this technology seemingly with no explanation.

9:05Because it tends to be in the past that when people were consistently coming in for their check-ins and appearing in court on time, that they would be moved to less and less invasive forms of tracking. And so the feedback we were getting from our sources is that that's not happening anymore, that suddenly people are actually being move towards more and more restrictive forms of tracking. And so we kind of started digging into that a little bit. And eventually we got a hold of a memo that ICE sent out to much of its staff on June 9th, saying that basically we need to bring all the people who are in this program into offices and put ankle monitors on them.

9:42The one exception they listed was pregnant women, who for whatever reason, they're not going to put ankle monitors on pregnant women. They're just going to put some kind of a wrist-borne technology that also has GPS tracking. Why is ICE implementing this policy now? That's a good question. I don't have an answer to that. What they tell us, I interviewed an ICE spokeswoman who said that this technology is an enforcement tool, and they said gone are the days of the catch and release policy, where they're saying that under President Biden and Obama, that the government would essentially detain people at the border who cross illegally at the border and then release them into the country and then lose track of them, is what the administration is saying.

10:28And that they're saying that the Trump administration is trying to change that. Are there many people who kind of go off the radar that don't show up for hearings that are unaccounted for? The vast majority of people in that position keep all of their court appearances and all of their check-ins. There was a study that from 2008 to 2018, a research group found using federal data, they found that something like 84 % of immigrants who are working their cases kept every single one of their court appearances. And if you talk to advocates for immigrants, they say that they have a strong incentive to keep regular and to appear at all the court appearances and to do all their check-ins because they want to have their case process.

11:13They want to be on a path towards citizenship. And they know that by missing these things or by absconding or not working their case, then they are at greater risk of being deported. How do these ankle monitors actually work? I mean, I imagine they're GPS power. There's a way to track where you are. But what is it actually like to wear one? What happens? So your movements are showing up on a screen. The device will ping a computer in a field office somewhere, usually within a short distance from your home. There's a field office where somebody who's your case manager is reviewing your movements.

11:55And basically that person is looking for a few things. They'll get an alert if an immigrant they're tracking goes out of their geographical boundary. The boundary could be a few mile radius. I've heard of somebody who has like a five mile radius. Who gets to decide that? This is all ICE officers' discretion. Make their decision. Yeah. Okay. So it could be a five-mile radius, or it could be a state, or it could be a few different states. The device will send an alert to a case manager if that person leaves their geographical radius. They will get an alert if the device is tampered with, if there's any evidence that maybe the person's trying to cut it off.

12:31And they'll get an alert if the device's battery runs out or if it's running low. And in all of these cases, the case manager will sometimes reach out and directly call that person and have a conversation. And if the case manager is not satisfied with, you know, this person is in compliance or not, they can always escalate the matter to somebody at ICE who could potentially, you know, make a decision that could harm this person's case. What's the battery life on these? You mentioned the battery can run out. So talking to people who have worn these devices and people who have served as case managers say that the batteries are a huge pain point with this.

13:11They tend to give people a backup battery so they can always be charging it. And you're kind of always playing this game of changing the battery in time before one runs out. the website for the company that runs this program on the behalf of the government called BI, their website says that the device's battery lasts 60 hours. But many of the people I've talked to say that it does not last that long. And they have found themselves changing the battery multiple times a day. And that can often be inconvenient. And it can often lead to situations where they're having to interact with their case manager when they're trying to get to work on time, or they're trying to put their kid to bed.

13:53So these interactions that you're having because a technology is not working properly or you have to kind of maintain this technology all the time really do intrude on someone's life. And this is not just a surveillance or a privacy issue. This is really just kind of a burden of daily living that you're putting on these people. Mm-hmm. Well, let's take a pause there. And then after the break, Doug is going to talk about the private companies that stand to benefit from this new policy. We'll be right back.

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15:08Doug, you are a corporate accountability reporter, so I know you are someone who's always thinking about how businesses are intersecting with all facets of life. And in this case, are there particular companies that will get a lot of business from the government due to the expansion of ankle monitors? Yeah, there's one company. Just one? Yeah. There's one company that's a monopoly over the entire federal government's immigrant tracking program. It's called BI Inc. It's based in Boulder, Colorado. and it's owned by a much larger conglomerate called the GEO Group, which we've been writing about a lot because the GEO Group is one of the main detention contractors that you're seeing in the news a lot lately.

15:59They run a lot of these big private prisons, essentially, that they're putting immigrant detainees in. And GEO Group also has an air carrier for deportation flights. They have vans and other ground transportation to move immigrants around the country. And about 14 years ago, when they wanted to expand their business more, they got into immigrant tracking. And so they acquired this company, BI, in Colorado. And they have since owned the only government contract around alternatives to detention. So they run this business completely. And that involves actually manufacturing the devices. They have a factory in Boulder that manufactures these devices.

16:40but also they have kind of an army of these case managers and field offices all over the country. And we don't know exactly how many there are, though. I think there are hundreds of these case managers, and each one of them can manage up to 200 or 300 immigrants at a time. So one of the complaints immigrants have is that the case managers don't actually have a lot of time to help them when they have a question or a request that needs help because these people's time is stretched its own thin. But these people aren't government employees, but they're managing immigration? So, yeah. So a lot of the work of managing the ins and outs of tracking these, it's all outsourced to this company.

17:22And a lot of trust is placed in this company and these employees they hire. A lot of them are young people, new college graduates who are given a training and a handbook and given authority over, you know, let's watch over these people's lives. How much does this company stand to make? So they have a contract currently that's worth about$250 million a year. But the contract is dependent on the number of people in it. I see. So if there's like more people, they make more money? Yeah. So they get an analyst estimated for us that they get about$3.70 per person per day who is being monitored. Now, that's across any form of monitoring.

18:05That's ankle monitor or just app check-ins. So we don't actually know how much more or how the economics will change if and when they increase the number of people on ankle monitors by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people more. But it's likely that this program is going to grow and that those numbers are going to grow likely by hundreds of millions of dollars. So, Doug, as you were digging into GeoGroup and its subsidiary, BI Inc., you know, Corporate Accountability Reporter, anything unusual or noteworthy that stood out to you about these companies? Yeah, so GeoGroup has a very close relationship with ICE.

18:48ICE is its largest customer, and GeoGroup is ICE's largest contractor. So there's a very close kind of symbiotic relationship. And there's a lot of personnel that move between these two organizations. There's been a lot of former ICE officials who go to GeoGroup, and there's been some former GeoGroup executives or consultants who go take jobs in the Trump administration. So we're seeing kind of a lot of movement between these organizations. And sources tell us and former ICE officials who have seen this kind of relationship between these groups pointed out to us that that can actually influence how ICE is making decisions and how to spend taxpayer money.

19:27And so, you know, a lot of the contracts that have been awarded this year have not all gone to GeoGroup, but many of the big kind of prime contracts have. They have awarded tens of millions of dollars to expand a giant ice detention facility down in Georgia. They have given out a large new contract for the GeoGroup's air carrier subsidiary. And so there's just a lot of money flowing in the direction of GeoGroup right now. And a lot of people questioning whether that might be partly due to the fact that people at ICE are very close and have close relationships to people at this company. I think there's one name in particular that I've heard come out as sort of people being concerned whether there's a potential conflict of interest.

20:16And that is Tom Holm and that's Trump's border czar. Is he connected to this company? Yeah. So he reveals in his ethics disclosure that he consulted for GeoGroup within the past couple of years. And not only that, but he consulted for the actual division of GeoGroup that runs the immigrant tracking program. Oh, wow. Which is what we're talking about right now. Yeah. Have you asked GeoGroup or BI Inc. or Tom Homan about this, about potential conflicts of interest? Yeah. So Tom Homan's spokesperson, a spokesperson for the White House, has told us that Homan recuses himself from all discussions of government contracts.

20:55Wow. Well, stepping back and just thinking again about monitoring people with GPS powered ankle monitors. Right now, we've seen, as you've alluded to, the Trump administration move to detain more and more immigrants than previous administrations and people showing up for appointments, being detained really in ways that are very surprising to them. And so when we're talking about these ankle monitors, in some ways, isn't this maybe on the one hand a less expensive approach than building more detention centers and giving more money to these companies to build and house people in these detention centers and also less disruptive to those people's lives where an ankle monitor versus being put in a detention center?

21:43Yeah. And in fact, one of the things we've heard that ICE officials, when they are bringing these people into the office and putting the ankle monitor in front of them and explaining that they have to wear it, they're giving them an option. They're telling them you can either wear the hardware or you can go to a detention center. And so for most people, obviously, that's not going to be a real decision. They're going to take the ankle monitor over living in a detention center. There definitely is an argument that this is more humane. You're not disrupting people's lives in the same way. You're not disrupting entire communities like we've seen with the raids around the country and the use of detention that we've seen ramping up significantly.

22:27I think that the administration probably looks just this as a numbers game. And right now, they've increased the number of people in detention from about 40 ,000 to about 60 ,000. They're hoping to eventually get enough space in detention centers to have at least 100 ,000 people in those facilities. But they can't have hundreds of thousands of people in detention. It's just too expensive, and there aren't enough detention centers. So this is just one more tool in their arsenal, I think, to have control over the greatest number of people that they're targeting for deportation. And I think probably they are looking at it as this is sort of the electronic monitoring and the detention centers are in a way sort of a staging ground for the deportation.

23:18And that the more they can get these people into their purview in these different ways, the quicker they could eventually get these people out of the country as soon as they get their cases resolved. What do you think this expansion of using GPS ankle monitors tells us about the expansion of government surveillance under this administration, using this technology and paying money for it to expand government surveillance? Yeah, not only that, but a government surveillance entrusted to this third party company that has minimal oversight. I mean, you're entrusting not just kind of a government employee to watch somebody's movements and track their lives.

24:03You're entrusting this other company that most Americans probably have never heard of. So, you know, what is the kind of oversight of that? And what are the laws and rules and guardrails that will prevent that from being abused?

24:21Well, Doug, thank you so much for sharing and also reporting this. It's really fascinating. Thanks for having me.

24:47great time to sign up. There's a special deal happening for a few more days for a premium subscription. The cool thing is that a premium subscription now comes with three extra logins, so you can share your subscription with family and friends. Check out the link in our show notes for details, or go to WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe. That's WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe. Today's show was produced by Renny Stronofsky. It was edited by Maggie Penman and mixed by Sean Carter. Thanks to Sylvia Foster-Frau, Tadeo Ruiz-Sandoval, Sabi Robinson, and Christine R. Mario. I'm Elahe Izadi. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.

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