Here at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), we’ve made it no secret that we would love to deport all the working-class Black and brown migrants once our country no longer needs their labor. ICE prides itself in arresting, detaining and deporting thousands of people every year. But we can’t deport or lock up everyone, due to politics, logistics, and money. So our workaround has been to create a giant surveillance and social control program.

Our Pathways to Deportation programs (which we call Alternatives to Deportation, or ATD) exist to preserve white dominance, through racial population management. Increasingly, we use ATD to selectively surveil and deport migrants whom we lack the capacity to detain and would otherwise have difficulty keeping tabs on. ATD allow us to maintain control over a larger number of people whose labor is exploited until we are able to deport them.

In public, we use the euphemism “Alternatives to Detention'' (though let’s be real, this isn’t an alternative to detention; it’s an add-on) to describe the ATD programs and subprograms, which include the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), Young Adult Case Management Program, Case Management Pilot Program partnership with DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and more to come. (Do your eyes glaze over at all those words? Good! That’s the point.)

Every ATD program utilizes surveillance and social control tools referred to as “case management” — to track, coerce and intimidate noncitizens into complying with forced banishment. While the government’s own internal review   does not support our claim that there is a difference in court attendance and compliance rates between those enrolled in the program and those who are not, we constantly use this argument to distract people from our actual goal: to put deportation and capital before human life.

‍ATD ensures second-class citizenship for enrollees while they live and work in US cities. Their hope that they will be able to win their cases and stay with their families keeps them compliant — even though, based on the way we’ve created our laws, the vast majority of people will not succeed in obtaining relief from deportation.

‍We’ve run the ATD program since 2004, and we’re always adding people to our system. We have been successful at outsourcing some of our operations to the nonprofit sector, and we continue to push these collaboration programs as politically viable alternatives to physical cages. As of August 2022, we’ve overseen 4.5 million noncitizens on our non-detained docket. These are people who, before ATD surveillance, we would have totally lost track of! We are so proud of our growth! 🙂

See original ICE text

It used to be that adults 18 years of age or older who are released from DHS custody would simply return to their lives. They might fight a case in immigration court, and all the while, many life-affirming services and rights would be denied to them. But now, with the continued expansion of ATD and other “non-custodial case management programs,” we’ve successfully widened our net!

We don’t have the capacity to keep so many people locked up, but rather than simply releasing people, we tell them that they may be eligible for enrollment in ICE’s ATD programs. This helps us create the illusion of benevolence while maintaining control over as many bodies as possible. As with all our programs, participants are relentlessly vetted by officers before enrollment, and yet, all decisions are made arbitrarily and secretly.

See original ICE text

Here at ICE (and in the US), we’ve been working for decades to impose the greatest amount of austerity at the lowest cost. What we won’t compromise on is the experience of utter dehumanization of migrant workers and their communities, and imposing upon them maximum restriction and punishment while ensuring that labor exploitation and freedom for capital is protected. To that end, we’ve managed to cut costs from the $150 a day it takes to pay for migrant detention (which goes to private contractors like CCA) to a mere $8 (which goes to the private contractor BI Incorporated)! Think about what you can buy for $8 a day: pretty much nothing.

See original ICE text

Each noncitizen enrolled in ISAP receives an individualized determination as to their level of oppression. ICE punishes people individually and collectively based on their vulnerabilities. However, when making decisions about initial placement and changes to supervision level, our methods are entirely arbitrary and we operate with 100% randomness. There are no standards! Your guess is as good as ours!

See original ICE text

The Department of Homeland In/Security is constantly experimenting on migrants with new technologies and reinventing old ways to dehumanize and spy on them and their communities in the US. We steal, store (and share!) biometrics and information from the people we target. You can read about some of our greatest hits here.

ISAP ATD uses three different types of technology to stalk and control migrants up to the moment of deportation and ensure compliance: telephonic reporting, Global Positioning System (GPS) monitoring, and SmartLINK. In April, we began testing a wrist-worn GPS monitoring device to bulk up our technology options and potentially enrich more vendors.

Our most old-school option is the telephonic reporting system, which allows us to compare participants’ voice prints stolen from their check-in calls against the voiceprints we recorded during program enrollment. Who even knows what we will do with these? The sky’s the limit!

We also record and store location and movement history via Global Positioning System (GPS) monitoring using satellites to monitor participants. We say that we don’t use the GPS units for constant tracking. But throughout the years we’ve used GPS ankle shackles, we’ve consistently lied about what we do with the data! We used data from ankle shackles to help plan the largest workplace raid in Mississippi in 2019 and we’ve only expanded ways to collect data since then, using devices that are far more sophisticated.

For instance, SmartLINK is an application that uses facial matching technology by comparing a selfie to a set of photos taken during program enrollment. Simultaneously, SmartLINK uses GPS to enforce compliance with deportation and other court orders. SmartLINK helps us to instill constant fear in migrants, their families and communities as we track them through every court date while they live and work here. We call this “virtual case management.” We often say that the application does not access personal data on a personally-owned phone such as call logs or history, contact information, text messages, or location data made outside of the SmartLINK application— but all of our paperwork with our contractors indicates otherwise. Check it out!

Increasingly, the majority of ATD participants are assigned to the SmartLINK application rather than the now much-maligned GPS ankle device. We at ICE are more than happy to throw these shackles under the bus and pretend that we are replacing them with more humanitarian options. We’re proud to say that as of December 2023, less than 9% of ATD participants have been assigned a GPS ankle monitor, and have instead been gaslit into thinking we are benevolent for assigning them to a different technology.

See original ICE text

Our strategy is to exploit unmet social needs by linking services to coercion, forcing people to submit to constant surveillance and control in exchange for access to inadequate or nonexistent services. If people complain, we tell them that it’s either this or a cage. We can't say all this publicly of course, but that's why we're coercing nonprofits into service relationships that we use to cover our tracks and convince people we're being "community oriented."

In August 2021, after successfully contracting with nonprofits and calling that community consent, DHS announced they had obtained even more tax dollars for a new, congressionally-directed pilot program called the Case Management Pilot Program (CMPP) that will provide involuntary case management and other “services” to surveil noncitizens in immigration deportation proceedings under the guise of “trauma-informed” care.

We also developed a new program called the Young Adult Case Management Program (YACMP) because we were concerned that we would not have enough capacity to detain all of the young people who were aging out of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. We launched YACMP in January 2023 in sixteen metropolitan areas. The goal was to coerce participants 18 to 19 years of age to comply with the deportation process. Since these noncitizens may be particularly ripe for exploitation, the YACMP connects participants with services and resources managed by a corporation with a strong record of demonstrated child abuse.

‍YACMP was a calculated step to accomplish our agency goals of mass social control without using electronic monitoring or building new jails, given that our capacity to imprison everyone is unfortunately limited and we anticipated some public outcry over the coercive surveillance of young people. Therefore, we don't employ conventional electronic monitoring methods, but we do require that our contractor regularly generate, gather, and exchange data about participants with ICE.

We’ve got plenty of programs for adults, too. As part of the ISAP services available to participants, ICE operates the Extended Case Management Services (ECMS) program in partnership with BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of one of the largest private prison companies of the world! ECMS is designed for participants whom we have either pathologized and/ or determined have vulnerabilities that make them the least likely to comply with a deportation process, and thus require intensive oversight. Given the traumas and vulnerabilities some of these individuals have, one could argue that we could just choose not to deport them — but why would we do that?

In 2020, ICE also incorporated Wraparound Stabilization Services (WSS) into the ATD program. WSS provide pathologizing services for vulnerable participants whom we claim “need” psychosocial and behavioral health support (not just money and the right to stay or migrate). We ensure that the specific needs of women and children are used as pretext for their holistic criminalization, so that no one gets left behind.

We keep growing, expanding and lying! We’re doubling down on recruiting well-meaning community partners, NGOs and service providers to provide cover for us, and even to run our “community-based” deportation management programs.By dangling the hollow promise of “service referrals” and “connection to resources” in a landscape of dire need (architected by decades of neoliberal austerity measures), we successfully exploit the desperation that migrants and targeted communities of color experience. What does “service referral” even mean in a world where safety nets and public services have been systematically decimated? Although some right-wing outlets claim that our programming provides “taxpayer-funded social services for illegal aliens,” the “services” we provide are “help” to get to one’s deportation hearings, and a list of website urls for underfunded legal services and addresses of local food banks. No taxpayer dollars spent here. Still, the desperation and scarcity is so real that it is easy to infiltrate community spaces and pretend that ICE is in the business of care. Our soon-to-be-announced program, Release and Reporting Management (RRM), means to capitalize on that scarcity. Stay tuned for more! 🙂

See original ICE text

JOIN US AND TAKE THE PLEDGE

Pathways to Deportation is a parody based on Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) “Alternatives to Detention (ATD)” website.DHS, ICE, and their predecessors have long used euphemistic terminology to conceal the coercion and violence inherent in its labor and deportation management programs. These programs, which purport to “help people,” are not just disingenuous but vile, since they leverage the desperation of migrants and their communities who have been systematically denied rights and resources — and whose home countries, lives and bodies are treated by US laws as fully exploitable for the project of global North imperialism. In December 2022, Community Justice Exchange attended a so-called ATD Symposium organized by ICE. At the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., ICE officials attempted to rebrand its ATD program under President Biden as more compassionate and humane, and to mark the beginning of a new era of case management in collaboration with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across the country. Those who attended the symposium with a critical eye quickly realized that ICE was attempting to sell non-profit organizations a deportation compliance plan, marketed using the language of “hope,” that would ultimately rely on and be legitimized by community organizations. After the symposium ended, ICE created a website summarizing its ATD talking points. The perspectives and insights of the communities most affected by these programs were conspicuously absent from the symposium and ongoing discussions. At CJE, after more than a year of learning from and supporting migrant-led organizations and criminalized people who were enrolled in ATD and faced deportation, it was glaringly clear that their robust abolitionist and freedom-centered analysis remained absent from many pro-immigrant and policy spaces. We wrote this parody, based on that analysis, to expose ICE's current tactic of infiltrating communities through non-profit organizations, and to continue to show that ICE is a violent organization that we should never work with and cannot be trusted.

Community Justice Exchange develops, shares and experiments with tactical interventions, strategic organizing practices, and innovative organizing tools to end all forms of criminalization, incarceration, surveillance, supervision, and detention. We provide support to community-based organizations across the country that are experimenting with bottom-up interventions that contest the current operation and function of the criminal legal and immigration detention systems. CJE produces tools and resources for organizers to creatively tackle multiple drivers of criminalization and incarceration— including, but not limited to, money bail, court fees and fines, probation and parole, pretrial detention & supervision, and immigration detention & supervision.

See original ICE text