ICE moves to shackle some 180,000 immigrants with GPS ankle monitors

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/07/24/ice-check-in-ankle-monitor-immigrants/

ICE moves to shackle some 180,000 immigrants with GPS ankle monitors
A June 9 memo directed ICE field officers to significantly expand the number of immigrants under round-the-clock surveillance.
July 24, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
By Douglas MacMillan and Silvia Foster-Frau

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has directed personnel to sharply increase the number of immigrants they shackle with GPS-enabled ankle monitors, as the Trump administration widens surveillance of people it is targeting for deportation, according to an internal ICE document reviewed by The Washington Post.

In a June 9 memo, ICE ordered staff to place ankle monitors on all people enrolled in the agency’s Alternatives to Detention program “whenever possible.” About 183,000 adult migrants are enrolled in ATD and had previously consented to some form of tracking or mandatory check-ins while they waited for their immigration cases to be resolved. Currently, just 24,000 of these individuals wear ankle monitors.

One exception would be pregnant women, who would be required to wear wrist-worn tracking devices, Dawnisha M. Helland, an acting assistant director in the management of non-detained immigrants, wrote in the letter. “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,” Helland wrote.

The new ankle monitor guidance, which has not been previously reported, marks a significant expansion of a 20-year-old surveillance practice steeped in controversy. While tracking devices are cheaper and arguably more humane than detention, immigrants and their advocates have long criticized the government’s use of the bulky black ankle bands, which they say are physically uncomfortable, impose a social stigma and invade the privacy of the people wearing them, many of whom have no criminal record or history of missed court appointments.

“This will be a tool used to extend the reach of the government from just the folks it can manage to put in physical detention to an additional hundreds of thousands more that it can surveil,” said Laura Rivera, a senior staff attorney at Just Futures, a nonprofit group that has done research on ICE tracking technologies. “It’s designed to turn their own communities and homes into digital cages.”

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