Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been quietly adopting a model for tracking illegal immigrants that is becoming less restrictive, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.
ICE’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program has been in place since 2004 to track those awaiting years-long court proceedings not in physical detention using GPS monitoring, phone applications and other forms of technology to track illegal immigrants released into the interior of the U.S. In recent years, the program has relied more on less restrictive and more expensive technology, according to ICE data and experts and foreign and current government officials who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In fiscal year 2019, ICE was tracking 55,918 illegal immigrants using GPS monitoring and 5,706 illegal immigrants using SmartLINK, which is a phone application that only knows the location of a participant if and only when they check in periodically. In fiscal year 2020, the agency was tracking 36,647 illegal immigrants using GPSs and 18,915 illegal immigrants with SmartLINK.
