Digital detention expands under the guise of compassion, report says

A new policy report jointly produced by the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, International Detention Coalition, and Refugee Law Lab, delivers one of the most comprehensive examinations yet of how digital monitoring has become central to U.S. immigration enforcement.

The report, From Surveillance to Empowerment: Advancing the Responsible Use of Technology in Alternatives to Detention, contends that so-called Alternatives to Detention (ATD) programs – marketed as humane, cost-effective substitutes for confinement – have evolved into a sprawling architecture of digital control, extending the reach of the carceral state through smartphones, GPS ankle monitors, and biometric surveillance tools.

Drawing from interviews, data analysis, and international consultations, the report situates these technologies within a global pattern of enforcement outsourcing. Its central argument is that federal agencies and private contractors have reframed surveillance as support, normalizing the continuous collection of migrants’ personal, geolocation, and biometric data under the rhetoric of efficiency and compassion.

The most prominent example remains the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, operated by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the GEO Group. ISAP was monitoring about 183,000 migrants as of March 2025 using combinations of GPS devices and smartphone applications such as SmartLINK.

While ICE touts the program as a humanitarian measure that ensures compliance at a fraction of the cost of detention, the report documents the opposite experience.

Participants describe the same fear and loss of autonomy that accompanies incarceration, only without walls. Devices malfunction, trigger false alerts, and demand unpredictable check-ins. Missed prompts can lead to penalties or re-detention, creating what advocacy groups have termed “digital cages.”

Recent data corroborate those concerns. The American Immigration Council reports that ATD funding soared from $126 million in 2017 to $443 million in 2022, and federal budget documents show allocations exceeding $470 million by 2024.

ICE’s own statistics reveal that the number of people under digital monitoring rose to more than 280,000 in 2023 before fluctuating around 180,000 in 2024–2025. Despite this growth, a 2022 Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit found that ICE “has not fully assessed program performance” and “lacks reliable data on cost and compliance outcomes.”

In July, The Washington Post obtained an internal ICE memo directing a major expansion of GPS monitoring. The order would replace smartphone-based reporting with ankle or wrist devices for nearly all ATD participants, including families and pregnant women.

The GEO Group quickly signaled to investors that the directive would increase revenue under its ISAP contract. Rights advocates argue that the expansion contradicts ICE’s claim that ATDs promote family unity and well-being. “We are watching the return of detention by other means,” one coalition organizer told reporters.

The Surveillance to Empowerment report frames this as a structural failure of governance rather than a series of policy missteps. By contracting surveillance responsibilities to private corporations whose profit models depend on scaling enrollment, the federal government has ceded both oversight and incentive alignment.

The report details how performance metrics – enrollment figures, device uptime, and compliance percentages – reward expansion, not resolution or dignity. “The goal,” the authors write, “has become keeping people in the system, not helping them out of it.”

Evidence from earlier, non-carceral programs strengthens that critique. The Family Case Management Program, a short-lived ICE pilot terminated in 2017, achieved court-appearance rates of 99 percent at about $36 per family per day, which is less than half the per-person cost of GPS monitoring.

The program relied on caseworkers and social-service referrals rather than digital tracking. Independent reviews found it to be both effective and humane, yet it remains defunded while electronic monitoring continues to expand.

Parallel developments abroad illustrate how the U.S. model is shaping international practice. Canada’s Border Services Agency has introduced ReportIn, a mobile application that verifies migrants’ identity and location through via photo submissions and location data through a smartphone app.

Civil-liberties groups have warned that the app’s architecture mirrors SmartLINK, collecting sensitive data without clear retention limits or transparency about cross-agency sharing.

In Mexico, the government’s rollout of the Unique Population Registry Code, a biometric national identifier, coincided with a U.S. Department of Homeland Security-sponsored program known as BITMAP, which equips regional partners to gather and transmit fingerprint and facial data into U.S. systems.

Privacy advocates in both countries describe these measures as a quiet form of enforcement externalization, embedding surveillance functions within civil registration and migration management frameworks.

The report’s emphasis on human impact resonates with these examples. Interviews with monitored migrants depict an environment of constant anxiety: phone alerts interrupting sleep, fear of signal loss during work shifts, and the stigma of visible ankle devices in public.

Clinical researchers cited by the report link such conditions to elevated stress, depression, and social withdrawal. “Technology has not replaced detention,” the report concludes. “It has redefined where detention takes place.”

Financial and technological opacity compound the problem. ICE and BI Incorporated have not publicly disclosed how SmartLINK stores or analyzes biometric data, or how often location samples are taken outside check-ins.

GAO investigators found that the agency’s oversight of contractor data security was inconsistent and that privacy assessments were often incomplete or outdated.

The report argues that meaningful reform must begin with transparency through publication of technical documentation, retention schedules, and audit results, and independent rights-impact evaluations.

Beyond critique, Surveillance to Empowerment offers a framework for reform grounded in proportionality and necessity. It urges governments to treat continuous geolocation and biometric verification as exceptional measures requiring individualized justification and periodic judicial review.

It also calls for investment in community-based case management, legal aid, and housing support—services shown to improve compliance without coercion.

Recent events underscore the urgency. In September, the Department of Homeland Security renewed its contract with GEO/BI for nationwide ATD services, ensuring continued reliance on proprietary monitoring platforms through at least 2027 if the option year is exercised.

Absent legislative or contractual safeguards, the report warns, this infrastructure will harden into a permanent digital bureaucracy of control, outlasting the political administrations that built it.

The debate over alternatives to detention has long revolved around cost and compassion. Surveillance to Empowerment reframes it as a question of power: who controls migrants’ data, movement, and autonomy in an age of networked enforcement.

By documenting how surveillance technologies reproduce the same inequities they claim to solve – and by outlining practical steps toward transparency and rights-based case management – the report provides both an indictment of the present system and a blueprint for replacing it.

The report’s conclusion is unequivocal: humane immigration governance cannot be achieved through technological containment. Only by separating support from surveillance can alternatives to detention live up to their name.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  border security  |  DHS  |  humanitarian  |  ICE  |  immigration  |  surveillance  |  United States