Surveillance tech

For decades, advocates and organizers have been fighting to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency plagued by inhumane conditions, a lack of accountability, and a culture of violence. In a major win for the immigrant justice movement, President Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget includes a reduction in immigration detention beds and in funding for ICE enforcement.

But even with this victory, there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that the federal government’s investments align with what our communities truly need. President Biden’s budget includes more than $500 million for ICE’s “alternatives to detention” (ATD), simply e-carceration, like ankle monitors. For many immigrants like myself that have experienced the horrors of both immigration detention and surveillance through ankle monitors, this is yet another reminder that we are still not free, we are bound, and shackled long after leaving a detention center.

As we reduce ICE funding and move away from the use of immigration detention, we cannot replace this cruel and immoral system with detention simply by another name. According to the Transactional Records Access ClearingHouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, there are over 225,000 families and individuals being intrusively surveilled by ICE.

Members of Congress now have the opportunity to change course and cut the proposed funding for ICE’s ATDs. Next week, the Senate will need to submit their priority request to appropriators. Instead of increasing resources for ICE’s deadly detention system and surveillance dragnet, they can invest in the vital programs and services that respond to the real need of our communities such as housing, healthcare, environmental protections, and education.

President Biden has justified his proposed investment as ‘reinventing detention’ – dramatically increasing e-carceration like ankle surveillance of immigrants as a ‘humane alternative’ to detention. The reality is that detention by any other name still deprives immigrants of our freedom, and the only entities that stand to benefit from this are the private prison companies scaling up their e-carceration technology under the guise of detention reform.

The constant monitoring I’ve experienced under ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) eats away at my mental health voraciously. I spent almost two years with an ankle shackle attached to one of my feet, which did nothing but hurt and shock me. Pre-pandemic, ISAP would visit my house on Tuesdays, and I couldn’t leave from six in the morning until six at night – even if they never showed up.

I lived in constant fear of getting re-detained. These ankle monitors reduce your existence to a constant state of panic: Is it fully charged? Is it working? What kind of socks should I wear to prevent this device from hurting me?

Excerpted: ‘It Is Time to End Inhumane ICE

Surveillance of Immigrants Like Me’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org