Amidst Violent Immigration Raids, DHS Turns to Big Tech to Silence Dissent

Jenna Ruddock is advocacy director at Free Press and Free Press Action.

On Thursday, Apple removed the mobile app ICEBlock and “similar apps” used by people in the United States to share information about nearby immigration enforcement operations from its App Store – reportedly following direct demands from the Trump administration.

ICEBlock allows people to crowdsource public information about immigration raids, described on its website as “Waze but for ICE sightings.” But according to an email sent from Apple to the app developer and provided to 404 Media, Apple decided that ICEBlock violates its policies against “Objectionable Content.” Apple told 404 Media in a statement that its determination was based on information “received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated” with the app.

In a statement to Fox News, which first reported the app’s removal, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that ICEBlock “is designed to put ICE agents at risk.” In June, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters that she’d asked the Department of Justice to look into prosecuting CNN for reporting on ICEBlock on the basis that the app “is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations.”

Despite the inconsistent justifications, the throughline is clear: the Trump administration has set its sights on anyone monitoring its expanding immigration enforcement operations, and it’s turning to major tech companies to help. In early September, DHS sent an administrative subpoena to Meta demanding information about several Instagram accounts, including StopICE.net – which similarly crowdsources information about immigration raids. A federal judge has temporarily blocked Meta from sharing that information.

Given the dominance of their respective app stores, Apple and Google both have an unusual degree of control over the content people can access through their phones. While removing ICEBlock from the Apple App Store does not immediately prevent those who have already downloaded the app from using it, it effectively prevents new users from accessing the app, and it will prevent the app developer from updating it to ensure continued functionality and security. ICEBlock was never available on Google Play, but Google confirmed to 404 Media that it has removed other ICE-spotting apps from its store.

This is not the first time either app store has been pressured to flex its power as an infrastructural bottleneck. In 2019, following pressure from the Chinese government, Apple removed an app that pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong used to crowdsource information about police activities. Google and Apple both removed an app built to coordinate protest votes against Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2021, after Russian authorities designated Putin’s core opposition as extremists.

It’s hard to see how crowdsourcing information on ICE operations is easily distinguishable from live reporting – an activity explicitly protected by the First Amendment. But it doesn’t seem like the Trump administration has any interest in making that distinction as it moves to ban and chill traditional media reporting on the topic, too.

Earlier this year, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, opened an investigation into a local radio station over its reporting on local ICE operations. As he’s done in other threatened investigations of media, Carr cited no law or rule or other precedent the station had violated, claiming only that reporting on ICE raids is somehow inconsistent with broadcasters’ “public interest” obligations.

In June, Emmy award-winning reporter Mario Guevara was detained while live-streaming a “No Kings Day” protest in Atlanta. While the charges leading to Guevara’s arrest at the protest were quickly dropped, he was immediately transferred to ICE custody. On Friday, after over 100 days in immigration detention, he was deported to El Salvador.

Apple and Google face no legal obligations to comply with the Trump administration’s demands to remove ICE-spotting apps, much less to echo plainly disingenuous narratives when faced with a transparent campaign to target and chill information-sharing about ICE operations. There are certainly “safety risks” surrounding the ongoing raids. Federal immigration agents are dragging children out of their homes in the middle of the night, throwing journalists to the ground in courthouses, and expanding their own capabilities to harvest location data directly from people’s phones and target people for deportation based on their social media posts.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has no qualms about sharing its own highly-produced videos of these operations – including reels featuring people who are half-dressed after having been pulled out of their beds by federal immigration agents, like the one DHS posted to social media in the aftermath of an apartment building raid in Chicago earlier this week.

Flashbang grenades, drones, and armed men rappelling onto the roof from Black Hawk helicopters were all part of a deployment of resources and show of force grossly disproportionate to storming an apartment building filled with families in the dead of night, but well-suited to a dramatic social media reel captioned: “Darkness is no longer your ally. We will find you.”