On Thursday, Apple removed ICEBlock — a popular crowdsourced app that tracked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent sightings — following pressure from the Trump administration. The move ignited criticism from immigration experts and follows a string of the administration’s decisions that have extended federal influence in the private realm.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App store — and Apple did so … ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed,” said DOJ Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement to Fox News.

Joshua Aaron, app developer and creator of ICEBlock, has since requested Apple to reinstate the app.

Before its removal, ICEBlock was the most popular ‘ICE tracking’ app on Apple’s App Store. The app allowed users to report and make publicly available sightings of ICE agents. Each report registered onto the app by a user would notify all other users within a five-mile radius. After 4 hours, the location of the report would be automatically deleted and made unavailable to all users.

Aaron told CNN that “[The Trump Administration has] been looking for every excuse to take the app down” and that “they want their paramilitary force [ICE] to act with impunity … and an app like ICEBlock does not allow that to happen.”

The DOJ’s move followed a shooting on Sept. 25 when 29-year-old Texas man Joshua Jahn opened fire at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement field, allegedly targeting ICE agents. The shooting killed one detainee and wounded two others. According to a report by ABC News, FBI Director Kash Patel said that Jahn engraved his bullets with anti-ICE messages and allegedly “searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents.”

Aaron criticized Apple’s compliance with the Trump administration’s orders in a CNN interview. The app’s features, he says, are no different from the features on Apple’s own Apple Maps, where users can report ‘speed traps’ — police-enforced speed limits using timing devices to identify speeding drivers — for other users of the app. “Whether it’s a speed trap or an ICE agent, … you’re just [pointing out] on ICEBlock — or Apple Maps — … [where] something in public … is,” he said.

The question of government overreach — whether it be in the realm of businesses or the individual — has been a recurrent topic during the Trump presidency. In the first few months in office, Trump instructed governors to deploy members of the National Guard in Democrat hotspot cities allegedly to suppress crime and illegal civil demonstrations; the action faced strong condemnation from state leaders and community organizers who claimed that the federal government was using militaristic intimidation tactics to suppress political dissent. Immigration enforcement has targeted student protestors and foreign scholars for political speech that is protected by the first amendment. Law firms which have challenged Trump have been targets of legal and business sanctions, losing access to government contracts and federal buildings.

Joanne Gottesman, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic and Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers University Law School, explained that apps like ICEBlock have gained more political relevancy in recent years as the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — but especially on guarantees of free speech and individual liberties — have intensified. “It’s not [as much of] an immigration issue, then, but a business one. It’s troubling to see the government apply pressure on private businesses to remove these apps,” she said.

But Gottesman, who founded the immigration clinic and has provided legal services to immigrants and low-income individuals in Southern New Jersey for over 20 years, added that while the app’s removal was concerning for the realm of individual liberty and free expression, the tangible benefits these apps provided for immigrants, too, remain dubious.

“[ICE] enforcement is so widespread … the [app] probably had a marginally [beneficial] impact, but as you’ve seen, the numbers of enforcement and the [number of] people swept up in these actions is incredibly high,” she said.

According to the experiences of one immigrant rights grassroots organizer, ICE Tracking apps failed to provide even the marginal benefit to immigrant communities that Gottesman highlighted. In fact, says Lucía Armengol, a Student Committee co-chair of New Jersey-based volunteer organizing network Resistencia en Acción NJ, they’ve brewed a frustrating atmosphere of “confusion, misinformation, and fear.”

“[We] have our own rapid response team that operates 24/7 by a Know Your Rights trained operator. When the operator receives a report of an ICE sighting [at a specific location], they contact a trained team of rapid responders who know how to interact with ICE [in person].”

Armengol proceeded to describe the intricate steps that rapid responders must take to verify and potential ICE presence before sharing the information with community members. In contrast, she says, apps like ICEBlock have no ‘confirmation process’ that renders its information reliable nor useful for many.
“A lot of people in the [New Jersey immigrant] community would share information from these apps in community chats. There would be a lot of confusion,” she said. “There’s no confirmation process. There’s no response. There’s no mechanism in place. It’s just anonymous information sharing that contributes to a lot of misinformation.”

Armengol added that many immigrant support networks around the country — including her own — expressed minimal surprise at Apple’s decision to concede to the Trump administration’s pressures. It was “inevitable,” she said, that large corporations such as Apple would concede to federal pressures; she thought it was precisely why immigrant communities have relied on grassroots support. And apps like Aaron’s, she says, are not assisting these efforts — at least not in any tangible way.

“[Imagine] there’s a fire, and people aren’t calling 911 and [instead] using an anonymous fire reporting app that doesn’t even call the fire department,” she said. “Wouldn’t you think the app is useless?”