Inside "ICE Tracker Dot Gov"
House Democrats are building a digital paper trail of immigration abuses — and a new front in Washington’s war over transparency.
WASHINGTON — On Wednesday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, announced his caucus would launch a “master ICE Tracker,” a digital record keeper designed to expose what he called “unconstitutional detentions and civil-rights violations” by federal immigration agents.
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“American citizens are being dragged off the streets by masked men and thrown into detention cells without access to a lawyer or even a phone call,” Garcia said. “No one, regardless of their background or appearance, should live in fear of being thrown behind bars by their own government because of their race or what they look like.”
According to committee staff, the tracker will compile verified reports from the public, advocacy groups, attorneys, and congressional field offices into a searchable database of ICE and CBP misconduct. “The tracker documents unconstitutional actions after they occur — it’s about accountability,” Garcia spokeswoman Sara Guerrero told Gizmodo.
A senior aide to another oversight Democrat who declined to be named in this article called the project “ICE Tracker Dot Gov” while acknowledging the tool is unlikely to be housed at that specific web address — for now. Registering a dot gov domain requires following a formal, identity-verified process managed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) through the Get.gov platform. The dot gov top-level domain is reserved exclusively for verified U.S. government organizations at any level … federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, and special-purpose entities.
GOP Resistance — and an Irish Provocation
Just after Garcia’s announcement, House Republicans led by Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) vowed to block the tracker from being hosted on official servers, including the dot gov domain registrar. It’s unclear if House Republicans have the authority to block domain registries, but Secretary Kristi Noem almost certainly does, as CISA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
“The House of Representatives absolutely will not maintain a website that tracks or doxes I.C.E. agents,” Steil said, breaking from MAGA talking points that have conflated tracking as doxxing throughout early Trump’s second term.
For example, MAGA stalwart Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), lead sponsor of the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, absurdly claims activists are endangering agents merely by naming them.
Dominick Skinner, the founder of ICE List, a crowdsourced website that publicly identifies agents involved in raids, was recently named and shamed by Blackburn on her senate website. “Apparently the work we’ve been doing made her uncomfortable enough to cite me as the reason behind a new bill in Congress,” Skinner wrote afterward. “They want to criminalize transparency.”
A former homeless youth from Ireland now living in Amsterdam where Blackburn has zero jurisdiction, Skinner told Migrant Insider he views unmasking as moral reciprocity: “We survived because the world accepted us as migrants. I believe in frictionless borders, equal opportunity, and that in a fair world migration wouldn’t even be an issue.”
For now, ICE List operates from servers in Europe — beyond U.S. jurisdiction and, as he jokes, “safe unless they invade the Netherlands.”
A Bicameral Oversight Offensive
Garcia’s announcement of the House Oversight Committee’s ICE tracker follows a joint letter to Noem from Garcia and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) demanding records on the detention of U.S. citizens by immigration agents.
Their inquiry cites ProPublica’s investigation showing that at least 170 U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained this year — many held for days without water or phone access. “It’s unclear how a wrongly ensnared U.S. citizen is supposed to prove their citizenship to armed agents who don’t believe their passport or REAL ID is real,” they wrote.
ICE’s Public Collapse
Garcia’s “master tracker” lands as ICE’s standing with the public hits historic lows. In February, half the country viewed ICE favorably; by June, that number flipped — 52 percent unfavorable, 39 percent favorable, with nearly 40 percent “very unfavorable.” August Pew polling placed ICE alongside the IRS as one of the least-trusted U.S. agencies.
Among Democrats, approval sits at 13 percent, and independents disapprove nearly two-to-one. Trump, meanwhile, seems unaware that ICE is now less popular than the IRS.
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Apple Joins the Firewall
The same cannot be said for the digital efforts of stateside advocates building tools to alert and catalog ICE raids. American tech companies have largely embraced the far-right’s drive to protect ICE from public accountability.
As Migrant Insider scooped earlier this month, Apple and Google quietly removed the DeICER app from its App Store after a law-enforcement complaint, invoking an anti-hate-speech rule normally reserved for shielding marginalized groups.
Apple’s notice claimed the app’s “purpose is to provide location information about law-enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.” The decision effectively made federal agents a protected class inside Apple’s ecosystem — a striking inversion of corporate civil-rights logic.
Developer Rafael “RC” Concepcion, a former Syracuse journalism professor, said DeICER had 30,000 users when Apple pulled it. “It isn’t meant to harvest people — it’s meant to inform people,” he said. “Recording public officials is not harassment. It’s democracy.”
From DeICER to Windbreaker: Tech Built for Oversight
Concepcion now wants to repurpose his privacy-first technology for Congress.
His latest platform, Windbreaker, could power the new federal tracker.
“It could be done in literally an hour,” he told Migrant Insider Thursday.
In a proposal sent to Garcia’s office reviewed by Migrant Insider, Concepcion offers Windbreaker to Oversight Democrats, describing a system that verifies reports through GPS and photo metadata, cross-checks authenticity, and stores no personal data.
“This isn’t software waiting to be funded,” the proposal reads. “It’s a shared infrastructure waiting to be adopted.” Not a week after Apple killed his app on their platform, Concepcion is already working with organizations in Chicago, North Carolina, and Massachusetts.
“DEICER platform could be implemented across states and can be used as a reporting structure and citizen facing platform to answer questions and inform on their rights,” he said on Thursday. “To get a whole of state approach ± you need to show that you’re willing to solve problems. That’s where these tools can be most helpful,” he added.
“A Ledger, Not a Map”
“This is a ledger,” a senior aide to Garcia Wednesday of the first-ever federal ICE tracker, adding: “It’s time Congress started keeping receipts.” How those receipts are gathered and where they are kept will matter.
In addition to banning DEICER, Apple also removed an app just last week that was meant to be platform for crowdsourcing evidence of abuses by immigration agents emboldened by a reckless policy dash to create a new secret police force with national jurisdiction and the blunt, sweeping authority to operate with utter impunity in American communities, especially those of color.
MY TAKE: Garcia has the opportunity to do something very important and impactful with his “master ICE tracker.” Now, he must execute by rolling out the tracker in coming weeks, as promised; then work with his colleagues in Congress and allies everywhere to encourage participation on a national level.
A minimum effort (a Google Form occasionally tended on the backend by an intern) will not due for this, not when Garcia has the chance to arm Americans with a digital sledgehammer aimed squarely at the black box of our ongoing federal immigration enforcement catastrophe.
Dig Deeper:
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Migrant Insider is doing such important reporting— what’s happening
to immigrants now will be happening to the rest of us if not stopped‼️
Yes, noticed the difference between the 1st no kings & the 2nd no kings. Took photos in the same locations, twice as many people the 2nd time. A lot more old people my age and older
The I come home and watch in social media , old people demonstrating in Europe being violently assaulted by law enforcement
Scary stuff