Great question. It’s as if programmers decided to create apps with the explicit purpose of obstruction of law enforcement. Strike that: It’s not as if that were the case. What other purpose would anyone create an app to track Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as they served warrants and made arrests?
That is the explicit purpose of ICEBlock, available to this moment on Apple devices. A similar app called “ICE Immigration Alerts” can be downloaded from Google’s Play Store. The perp in this week’s sniper attack on an ICE facility in Dallas used ICEBlock to track agents, and the agency made sure to point it out:
The alleged shooter who killed one detainee and injured two others at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on Sept. 24 had previously used a popular app that flags sightings of immigration officers, authorities said.
White House Press Secretary Leavitt criticized the app, ICEBlock, tying it to the “leftist lunatic shooter” in Dallas. FBI Director Kash Patel released details about the shooter’s Internet history, including using “apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents,” without naming ICEBlock. …
ICEBlock is a dangerous development for officers, said Marcos Charles, acting executive associate director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations at a press conference in Dallas Sept. 25.
“It’s a casting call to invite bad actors to attack law enforcement officers,” Charles said. “It’s no different than giving the hitman the location of their intended target and this is exactly what we saw happen in Dallas yesterday.”
The app’s owner, Joshua Aaron, told USA Today that it was “insanity” to connect his app to the shooting in Dallas. The time lapse on tracking data alone would not make that a practical theory, and that the app does not produce “predictive analytics” that would suggest destinations for agents in transit. Thus far, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice has not contacted Aaron to demand that it be shut down, but if he does hear from them, Aaron pledges to maintain the service with help from his “amazing legal team.”
He may well prevail against government action. The bigger question is why platforms like Apple and Google offer access to these apps. The best-case use still seems designed to expose ICE operations in ways that could increase danger for LEOs and civilians; the worst-case use would be to deliberately track these agents for violent attacks. Even the best-case use would still appear aimed at obstructing legitimate law enforcement operations.
So why are Apple and Google still platforming ICEBlock and similar apps, even after their nexus to violent acts are apparent? The Spectator’s Gage Klipper wants an answer to that, preferably as a market reaction, but warns that government agencies may need to get involved for their own protection:
ICEBlock is an app that uses real-time information to pinpoint the location of ICE agents in the field. Launched in April in response to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, it now boasts more than one million users across the country.
Among them, until recently, was self-styled “anti-fascist” sniper Joshua Jahn, who killed one person – a detainee – and critically injured two more at an ICE facility in Dallas. The FBI has discovered that Jahn used the app, or one like it, to track his intended victims. In a handwritten note, Jahn, who took his own life, wrote, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror.”
ICEBlock claims that its purpose is to help illegal immigrants evade arrest by alerting them to the presence of ICE agents. But its far more wicked use as an assassin’s tool has for a long time been all too easy to predict with the left’s prolific and incendiary rhetoric around “Nazis” and “fascists,” the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the new record-high of left-wing terror attacks.
Klipper notes that both AG Pam Bondi and border czar Tom Homan have warned that the DoJ may intervene to shut the app down. That would trigger Aaron’s “amazing legal team” into action, of course, and they could prevail — possibly. Police activity is generally considered public, except where undercover operations take place and where agents have higher risks. ICE isn’t a counter-terrorism outfit or on some other mission where secrecy is a necessity. In many of the cases where protests take place, ICE has mainly conducted warrant service, looking for people already known to be absconding illegal aliens, usually suspected to be involved in other criminal activities.
Even if Aaron’s app and operations passes legal muster — and that may be a tough argument considering the clear aim of supporting crowd-sourced obstruction — it doesn’t let Apple and Google off the hook. Klipper argues that these Big Tech companies are helping to unravel the social fabric by undermining the rule of law:
Yet it’s an even deeper question of what kind of country we want to live in: one where ICE agents are seen as brownshirts for enforcing basic U.S. law, or one where law, order, and common sense receive the unanimous respect necessary for a functioning nation?
What kind of country do Apple and Google want to live in? That’s the real question they should answer — as well as their consumers.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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