Trump Moves to Force Millions of Immigrants into Digital Cages
The trump administration’s diabolical scheme to rid the U.S. of documented and undocumented immigrants has taken a new and more sinister turn with plans to create digital prisons for millions of victims and convert their communities and homes into digital cages.
The plan involves greatly expanding government surveillance of people targeted with deportation by shackling nearly 200,000 adults migrants with GPS-enable ankle monitors. The monitors would be required of adult migrants who are enrolled in “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD), a program that is a temporary alternative to incarceration and is run by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The only exception would be pregnant women, who would be required to wear wrist-worn tracking devices.
Presently, most ATD participants are not fitted with ankle monitors but are required to keep contact with ICE by using an app that relies on facial recognition. Currently, 84 percent of the migrants are required only to check in virtually through the SmartLINK app, which uses facial recognition to confirm identities and GPS to confirm locations.
The new plan would greatly increase the number of people who would have to wear the monitors that can track users anywhere and at any time.
Many of those who would be shackled have no criminal record, but ICE claims the monitors are necessary to track the high number of migrants who fail to attend court hearings for their cases. However, an analysis by the American Immigration Council found that 83 percent of non-detained immigrants with completed or pending removal cases attended all of their court hearings from 2008 to 2018.
Migrant case managers get an alert when the person leaves the area, if the device is tampered with or if its battery runs out. Case managers typically call the participant and warn them they may be violating the terms of their release or they may report the matter to ICE. The bulky ankle monitors weigh about six ounces and are about the size of a cell phone. They cannot be easily tampered with, are known to be uncomfortable, are easily visible and can socially stigmatize those who are forced to wear the devices.
The contract for the additional monitors has been granted to BI Inc., a company that started by selling devices for farmers to monitor cattle. BI is a subsidiary of Geo Group of Boca Raton, Fla., a private prison giant with 2024 revenues of $2.424 billion. GEO previously employed at least two of trump’s top immigration officials and donated more than $1.5 million to the president’s 2024 campaign and inaugural committee.
A report by the Community Justice Exchange and other groups found that ankle bracelet surveillance is a digital form of detention and “the state’s constant reminder of the lack of autonomy immigrants have over their own bodies and futures.”
“Across technologies, surveillance causes physical and psychological trauma, prevents employment, and negatively impacts entire families and communities,” the report found. “Ankle shackles are painful, intrusive, stigmatizing, unsafe and disruptive to daily life — they are another form of incarceration.”
In addition to making it difficult to find employment, the fear of constant monitoring silences family ties, organizing efforts, and the ability for immigrants to speak freely and advocate for themselves and their communities.
The report included facts uncovered through an ICE Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. It found that ICE subjects more than 1.2 million immigrants to various forms of surveillance, including GPS ankle shackles and SmartLINK.
“Immigrant communities have long documented the lasting trauma caused by these electronic forms of incarceration, also known as digital prisons,” the report noted, adding that 25 members of Congress have expressed concern about the “drastic increase” in the program and the “extreme physical and mental damage” caused by punitive surveillance.
A group of lawmakers, in a Feb. 22, 2022, letter, called on then-Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to cut back on the shackling program. Lawmakers cited a recent report that found that more than 90 percent of participants experienced physical harm due to ankle shackles including swelling, open wounds, and even permanent scars and electrical shocks. A full 88 percent of immigrants in the program reported the shackles harmed their mental health and an alarming 12 percent reported experiencing suicidal thoughts. The letter also said that immigrants are required to wear the bracelets for an average of 629 days each.
Data collected includes personally identifying information including address, email address, phone number, birth date, social security number, visa and passport number, employment information, education information, financial information, religious affiliation, race, gender, etc. It also includes biometric and body/health data such as facial images, voice prints, weight, height, tattoos, scars, medical information, disabilities, pregnancy and births, etc. Other data includes vehicle license plate number, driver’s license number, and vehicle registration number.
A November 2024 report by Legal Clarity Team found that individuals subjected to the shackling devices often experience a profound impact on their personal privacy, as their movements and activities are continuously tracked.
“This level of monitoring can lead to feelings of intrusion, as the line between ensuring public safety and respecting personal boundaries becomes blurred,” the report found. “The data collected by ankle monitors can provide detailed insights into an individual’s daily life, raising questions about who has access to this information and how it is used.”
Each ATD participant generates about $3.70 in revenue per day for bracelets and the planned expansion to millions of migrants could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in new annual revenues for BI.
More Detention Centers
While digital imprisonment grows, border czar Tom Homan’s goal is to double the nation’s detention capacity by reopening older facilities to hold at least 100,000 immigrants slated for deportation. To reach the goal, ICE has been ordered to arrest at least 1,200 to 1,500 a day, including many unauthorized immigrants with no criminal records.
ICE has reopened Delaney Hall in Newark, a facility owned by the GEO Group that shut down in 2023. With capacity for up to 1,000 detainees, Delaney Hall may become the largest ICE detention facility on the East Coast. Since the announcement, shares of GEO Group rose 6 percent because of a 15-year agreement that the company values at about $1 billion. The company has seen its value nearly double to $3.8 billion since the 2024 election.
ICE is working closely with private prison companies to expand many of the 114 ICE detention facilities around the country where detainee populations are nearing maximum capacity. The two largest contractors, GEO and CoreCivic, own 16 idle facilities.
More than half of the 17 ICE facilities operating from 2020 to 2023 were found to have poor medical care and violated environmental health and safety rules, according to an analysis by the U.S. Office of Inspector General.
Three ICE detainees who suffered health problems died this year while living in detention centers. They included a 29-year-old Honduran man who died on Jan. 23 after having difficulty breathing; a 44-year-old Ukrainian man who died in February because of bleeding from the brain; and a 45-year-old Ethiopian man who died on Jan. 29.
Many of the facilities being considered for reopening were ordered closed in 2021 by President Joe Biden’s executive order banning privately operated criminal detention facilities. Trump has since reversed the order.
The U.S. military also plans to expand migrant detention at their facilities, including at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas.
GEO Group
The GEO group was formed in 1984 by George Zoley as a division of The Wackenhut Corporation. The Wackenhut Corporation was created in 1954, in Coral Gables, Fla., by George Wackenhut and three partners, all former FBI agents. Wackenhut had a long history of working with the U.S. government and military. Many former CIA, FBI and other government officials have served on the company’s upper levels over the years. Wackenhut was alleged to be a CIA front company during the cold war
During the McCarthy era, the right-wing Wackenhut began compiling files with information on politically suspect individuals, accusing them of communist activities. In 1965, Wackenhut told potential investors that the company had files on 2.5 million suspicious individuals, one in every 46 American adults. By 1966, Wackenhut had collected more than 4 million names.
The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Boca Raton, Fla., that invests in private prisons and mental health facilities in the United States, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The company’s facilities include immigration detention centers, minimum security detention centers, and mental-health and residential-treatment facilities. As of September 30, 2024, the company owned or managed 80,000 beds at 99 facilities, making it the largest prison operator in the United States. In 2019, agencies of the federal government of the United States generated 53 percent of the company’s revenues.
The company has been the subject of civil suits by prisoners and their families for injuries from riots and poor treatment at prisons and immigrant detention facilities. In 2012 , GEO settled a class-action suit for its mismanagement of Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi. As a result, the GEO Group lost the contract for the youth facility and two other Mississippi prisons, which it had been operating since 2010.
Related federal investigations of kickback and bribery schemes associated with nearly $1 billion in Mississippi state contracts for prisons and related services have resulted in the criminal prosecution of several public officials in the state. In 2017, the state attorney general announced a civil suit for damages, to recover monies from contracts completed in the period of corruption.
GEO and a competitor, CoreCivic, donated a combined $250,000 for trump’s inaugural festivities. GEO gave $275,000 to the pro-trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now. A $100,000 donation was made only a day after the Biden Department of Justice announced it would be phasing out for-profit prison and detention contracts.
In April 2018, a wholly owned subsidiary of GEO Group called GEO Acquisitions II gave $125,000 to a trump political action committee in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which bars companies with active contracts with the federal government from making political donations.
In September 2017, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued GEO Group for not paying immigrant detainees the state’s $11 hourly minimum wage, calling detainees “a captive population of vulnerable individuals who cannot easily advocate for themselves.” GEO was paying detainees with snacks or $1 per day for their labor in March 2023.
A class-action lawsuit filed by the Social Justice Legal Foundation alleged that GEO Group engaged in a “months-long poisoning” of more than 1,300 detainees at the Adelanto Detention Center in San Bernardino County, Calif., by improperly spraying a cleaning agent known as HDQ Neutral in poorly ventilated areas from February 2020 to April 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In June 2024, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) filed an administrative complaint against GEO Group, alleging that GEO Group used a disinfectant known as Halt without proper protections at its Adelanto Detention Center more than 1,000 times in 2022 and 2023. In 2025, after trump’s election, the EPA dropped the case without providing an explanation.
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, was previously a paid consultant for the division of Geo that oversees immigrant monitoring.
After they have been temporarily held, many immigrants have been quickly and quietly spirited away to detention in foreign nations, aboard flights owned by CSI Aviation Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M., with bases in Killeen, Texas, and West Palm Beach, Fla.
In February, ICE posted a notice that it would award a no-bid contract to CSI Aviation to fly targeted immigrants out of the U.S. The contract is worth up to $128 million and will last for at least six months beginning on March 1, and possibly extend up to a year. CSI has been awarded a total of at least $1.6 billion in no-bid contracts since 2025.
CSI CEO Allen Weh and his wife, Rebecca Roberton Weh, started CSI Aviation, Inc., in 1979. The firm has grown into a multimillion-dollar company, providing services to corporations, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and commercial medical flight services among others. Weh, a former Republican candidate for U.S. Senator and governor of New Mexico also served as chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party from 2004 to 2008.
Weh’s daughter, Deborah Maestas, a former CSI president and also a former chairwoman of the New Mexico GOP, was one of several “fake electors” named as part of a scheme to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election after trump disputed the outcome. The so-called fake electors submitted certificates of their state’s electoral votes for trump despite trump’s loss in their state. State law enforcement investigated Maestas and others and declined to prosecute.
Weh, his daughter, and his wife have collectively donated about $840,000 to trump-aligned political action committees. CSI Aviation also hosted a trump campaign rally at a hangar it owns just days before the 2024 presidential election.
CSI came under fire in late 2017, when 92 Somali immigrants on a CSI-contracted plane were forced to stay shackled for nearly two days. For about 23 hours, the plane simply sat on a tarmac, and the immigrants were not allowed off.