ICE Contractor Falsely Reported Big Increase in Ankle Monitors on Illegal Immigrants: Report

Actual data show 'usage is ... way down, not up'

An immigrant from Honduras that entered the country illegally wears an ankle monitor at a shelter in San Antonio on July 27, 2015. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency contractor reported—and the government regularly published—false data showing a huge increase in the use of ankle monitors to track illegal aliens released into the United States, according to a transparency watchdog.

A report compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University follows a December 2022 statement by ICE acknowledging that throughout that year, the agency published data showing big increases in the agency’s use of electronic ankle monitors through the Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program for illegal immigrants, when, in actual fact, far fewer such devices were being used.

TRAC maintains a huge, publicly available archive of official data on a wide variety of government programs, litigation, and activities that otherwise would be difficult to track down. By regularly filing multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to federal agencies such as ICE, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and federal judges.

“What lies behind ICE’s frequent posting of Alternatives to Detention (ATD) data that the agency now admits was incorrect?” the TRAC report reads.

“The data ICE had been posting for months showed that use of GPS ankle monitors had been increasing. ICE now reports this is incorrect, that ankle monitor usage is in fact way down, not up.

“TRAC received a partial answer in the data we received March 1, 2023, in response to one of our FOIA requests. ICE reported these records comprised a copy of the participant-by-participant report that ICE’s contractor BI, Inc., had furnished at the end of FY 2022. This report had been the basis of the statistics ICE had posted back on September 29, 2022, and remained online at the agency’s website through December 8, 2022.

“TRAC analyzed this newly released participant-by-participant report from BI, Inc. We found that the contractor (a subsidiary of the GEO Group), which is responsible for carrying out the ATD program, has systematically reported incorrect information to ICE, which ICE then passed along, uncorrected, to the public.

“Misreporting involved more than the use of monitoring technologies. Substantial public funds may also be at stake. ATD costs and presumably payments due the contractor also had substantially been inflated by perhaps 31 percent as a result of these reporting errors.”

According to the most recently available data from ICE, the agency had issued tracking monitors to 293,167 individuals as of Feb. 25, compared to 376,305 as of Dec. 31, 2022, according to TRAC, which warned that it’s still in the process of analyzing source documents.

The misreporting wasn’t limited to ankle monitor usage. Usage of other ATD technologies, including SMART-Link and VoiceID to track the locations of illegal immigrants within the country also declined.

“Not only did the use of GPS monitors drop, but the public now learned that one-in-nine (11 percent) were not being monitored with the use of any technology at all!” the report reads.

The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, didn’t respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment on the TRAC report.

The ATD program has been around since 1997, but until President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, its use was severely limited by the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) requirement that all illegal immigrants be detained until their cases were adjudicated in court.

As part of his reversal of President Donald Trump’s clampdown on illegal immigration from Mexico into the United States, Biden directed ICE to begin releasing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants after they were detained as part of a more humane approach.

“Of the more than 2.2 million migrants apprehended at the Southwest border in FY 2022, just over 1.054 million were expelled under CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] orders issued pursuant to Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That leaves 1.152 million-plus who were processed for removal under the INA,” Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) resident fellow Andrew Arthur said.

“‘Processed for removal’ doesn’t mean that those aliens were removed, and the vast majority weren’t. They were simply placed on the often years-long track to appear before an immigration judge who will determine whether they should be granted relief or removed,” Arthur said.

“Most weren’t detained, either. CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] statistics reveal that in FY 2022, Border Patrol released just fewer than 311,000 migrants apprehended at the Southwest border on their own recognizance (“OR” without bond or other conditions) with a Notice to Appear (NTA), and released just over 338,000 others on “Parole+ATD.”