ICE Plans to Track Over 180,000 Immigrants With Ankle Monitors: Report

ICE plans to expand its use of electronic surveillance of immigrants from about 24,000 people currently fitted with GPS ankle monitors to about 183,000 people, according to a report from the Washington Post. The move will continue to shovel money to the private prison industry, which has been making money hand over fist since President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second time in January.

ICE released an internal memo on June 9 about the so-called Alternatives to Detention program, which allows immigrants to remain out of jail or detention camps while their cases are heard. The memo ordered the roughly 183,000 adult migrants involved in the program, which often involves checking in with the courts and immigration officers, to be outfitted with monitors, according to the Post.

Pregnant women would be required to wear a GPS wrist tracker rather than an ankle monitor, according to the new reporting. And while ankle monitors may sound preferable to getting locked up in some ICE detention facility, it’s still a dehumanizing process. The ankle monitors are also known to leave bruising and rashes and reportedly have a terrible battery life, making them inconvenient for people trying to go about their day without being flagged as in violation of the terms of their release.

As the Post notes, the tracking program is run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of GEO Group, which got its start in 1978 by making a tracking device for cattle.  SmartLINK, which is a smartphone app that uses facial recognition to verify the identity and location of an immigrant in the program, is used in the vast majority of check-ins, though ICE doesn’t seem to think that method is good enough, given the pivot to more ankle monitors. ICE didn’t respond to questions emailed by Gizmodo on Thursday.

The private prison industry was ecstatic after President Trump beat Kamala Harris in November 2024. GEO Group and CoreCivic saw their share prices soar after Election Day. GEO Group went from $14.18 on Nov. 4, the day before the election, to $26.48 just a couple of days after the election. Similarly, CoreCivic went from $13.19 to $23.94. GEO Group closed at $24.55 on Thursday, and CoreCivic closed at $19.97.

GEO Group president and COO Wayne Calabrese said on an earnings call that he expected the incoming Trump administration to take a more “expansive approach to monitoring the several millions of individuals who are currently on the non-detained immigrant docket,” according to HuffPost.

“We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up our capabilities to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions of individuals, in order to achieve the federal government’s immigration law compliance objectives,” Calabrese said. The only big problem, as the Post explains, is that ICE wants so many new ankle monitors that GEO Group may not have the ability to scale up that fast, meaning the agency could court other vendors.

Calabrese noted on the call that Republicans had previously floated the idea of monitoring 7 million immigrants in the U.S. with some form of monitoring, whether it was through ankle devices or cellphone surveillance. GEO Group donated $1 million to Trump’s re-election campaign through a group called Make America Great Again Inc., according to OpenSecrets. The company contributed an additional $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee, according to CREW. And it looks like they’re going to get their money’s worth.