Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been ordered to fetter nearly 160,000 immigrants with GPS shackles marking them for tracking, detention and deportation, according to a June 9 memorandum reviewed by the Washington Post and reported by the newspaper Thursday.
The memo reviewed by the Post calls for every person that is currently enrolled in the agency’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) programs to be placed under GPS monitoring “whenever possible.”
“If the alien is not being arrested at the time of reporting, escalate their supervision level to GPS ankle monitors whenever possible and increase reporting requirements,” wrote Dawnisha M. Helland, acting assistant director in the management of non-detained immigrants, according to the paper.
The use of GPS monitors is not for public safety but to publicly humiliate and intimidate immigrants, many of whom are simply waiting for court cases and asylum claims to be adjudicated. It is the modern-day version of the Nazis forcing Jewish people to wear yellow Stars of David. Instead of yellow fabric, immigrants will be forced to wear burdensome and invasive trackers, making it easier for the immigration Gestapo to detain them.
The Post reported that the only exception to being forced to wear an ankle GPS tracker was for pregnant women, who are to be made to wear wrist monitors.
EM, or electronic monitoring, has exploded under ICE over the last two decades, according to a 2024 report from Vera Institute of Justice. The report features data collected from legal systems in all 50 US states and more than 500 counties, as well as from federal courts, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and ICE.
The report found that while ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) is billed as an “Alternative to Detention” (ATD), it is often used on people who should never be detained in the first place or have already been released from detention. The program has massively expanded in the last decade under both the Trump and Biden administrations, peaking under the latter administration with some 378,000 people being monitored.
The Post reported that currently only 24,000 people are wearing ankle monitors under ATD programs and that the new directive will apply to some 183,000 people.
ISAP started in 2004 as a $3 million program; by April 2005 approximately 1,300 people were being tracked. As of November 2022 this number had exploded to over 340,000.
ISAP monitoring is extremely lucrative for the sole private contractor that administers the program, BI Incorporated, which was acquired by the GEO Group in 2011. The private prison profiteer donated lavishly to the Trump campaign, providing the aspiring dictator a $500,000 donation in February 2024 and $1.5 million overall to the 2024 Trump campaign and Trump inauguration committee.
While there are hundreds of billions in cuts for Medicaid and food stamp programs in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” under both Democrats and Republicans ISAP’s budget has exploded to nearly $530 million as of 2023.
Asked to comment on the report Thursday, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said, “I’m not in the weeds on that but I support it. … If that is happening, I support it 100 percent.” Homan added, “GPS [monitoring] in the past has been very helpful in getting people to court.”
Under conditions where immigrants are being ambushed and disappeared at courthouses, the new directive is intended to speed up the fascistic mass deportation operation. Homan reiterated that the “goal” of the Trump administration is to “arrest everybody we can.
“We are going to work our way up to 100,000 beds. We have the funding to do it, and we are working on it,” he said.
“Our goal is to arrest everybody we can. … I’ll say it again, in sanctuary cities, where our priority is now, you forced us into the community to arrest the bad guy, find the bad guy, if he’s in the country with others who are here illegally, they are coming too.”
Homan again threatened large cities with Democratic mayors that federal agents “are going to flood the zones, sanctuary cities are going to get exactly what they don’t want. More agents in the communities and more work site enforcement.”
Far from arresting “bad guys,” the Trump administration and the immigration police have overwhelmingly targeted immigrants whose only “crime” was applying for asylum in the US. One of the more criminal acts carried out by the second Trump administration was the deportation of roughly 250 Venezuelan men and dozens of Salvadorans without due process to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in mid-March.
Trump illegally invoked the Aliens Enemies Act to deny the men their rights and falsely claimed they were members of the gang “Tren de Aragua.” On July 18, four months after the men were sent to the notorious prison in violation of court orders, a prisoner exchange took place between the US government and Venezuela which saw the release of 10 Americans or US permanent residents and the release to Venezuela of the Venezuelan migrants sent to CECOT.
Now that the men have been released, many are speaking out on the horrific treatment they received. Andry Hernández Romero, 32, a gay makeup artist sent to CECOT for having tattoos that paid tribute to his mother and father, told local outlets in Venezuela, “It was an encounter with torture and death.”
Romero legally entered the US in 2024 and had already passed a credible fear interview when he was detained by ICE. Despite having no criminal record, Romero was deported to CECOT.
“Many of our fellows have wounds from the nightsticks; they have fractured ribs, fractured fingers and toes, marks from the handcuffs,” Romero said in a report from Reuters.
Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, a former professional soccer player, was also illegally detained and deported to CECOT under false charges that he was a gang member under the Alien Enemies Act. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Barrios said guards greeted him and others: “Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of bitches. You’ve arrived at the Terrorist Confinement Center. Hell on earth.”
Food and bedding was insufficient, and the water was contaminated, Barrios told the paper. He said he and others were regularly beaten. “There was blood, vomit and people passed out on the floor.”
As was the case with Romero, Barrios has never been charged with a crime. He was “identified” as a gang member because he had a tattoo, but the tattoo celebrated his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid.
The US government has yet to provide a comprehensive list of everyone it illegally deported to CECOT, but Bloomberg reported in April that as many as 90 percent of those deported to the torture prison had no criminal record.