ICE Is Putting Ankle Monitors on People Who Show Up for Immigration Court Hearings

When attorney Olavo Michel left a San Diego immigration courtroom with his client, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers quickly swarmed them in the hallway.

They gave Michel a piece of paper that instructed his client, an asylum seeker from Russia, to go to the ICE offices on a lower floor in the federal building for an appointment immediately. His client and other immigrants in this article are not being identified due to retaliation concerns.

“The officers weren’t even trying to have a conversation,” Michel recalled. “They were talking over me. They were trying to hand stuff to my client without permission. They were aggressive and condescending to me.”

The reason for the sudden appointment? Even though Michel’s client was showing up for his court hearings in pursuit of asylum, ICE officers wanted to attach an ankle monitor to him — the bulky black device that makes many feel stigmatized, as if they had committed crimes. In recent weeks, ICE has strapped these monitors to many immigrants leaving court in an apparent shift in policy to increase the surveillance of immigrants.

“The protocol now appears to be placing everybody on alternatives to detention either in the form of an ankle monitor or a bracelet,” Michel said. “At a minimum, it appears to be just a blanket policy.”

ICE has been arresting certain people after their immigration court hearings nationwide for months. 

At the beginning of August, federal Judge Jia M. Cobb blocked ICE from applying a fast-track deportation process called expedited removal to people who had been allowed into the U.S. through humanitarian parole, which included many of the people arrested at immigration courts. More recently, the Washington, D.C.-based judge blocked the Trump administration from fast-tracking deportations of people arrested in the interior of the U.S. 

“Prioritizing speed over all else will inevitably lead the Government to erroneously remove people via this truncated process,” Cobb wrote in the decision.

A couple of weeks ago, volunteers who monitor ICE activity at the San Diego Immigration Court noticed ICE officers were handing out letters in the court hallway, and that officers were putting ankle monitors on those who received the letters.

It’s not clear how widespread the new practice is around the country. Through a spokesperson, attorneys at the New York Legal Assistance Group said they hadn’t yet seen ICE putting ankle monitors on people who showed up to courts in their city.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Josh, a volunteer at the San Diego court, told Capital & Main that an ICE supervisor told him that ICE would be tracking “everybody.” He asked that his last name be withheld over concerns about retaliation related to his volunteer work. 

As of late August, ICE was monitoring more than 182,000 people in the alternatives-to-detention program, which includes GPS tracking through ankle monitors or bracelets and other check-in requirements, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, which analyzes government data through public records requests. The organization cautioned that ICE’s data on alternatives to detention may have errors in it.

People in the program have been monitored on average more than 700 days, TRAC reported.

According to ICE, the cost per participant in alternatives to detention is less than $4.20 per day, far less than the more than $150 spent per day on someone in custody. However, the cost per day ranges depending on the type of technology used for monitoring. In a 2023 report, the American Bar Association found that the U.S. government was spending more than $200,000 per day to pay for the technology to monitor about 194,000 immigrants in alternatives to detention programs — though most were tracked through a phone application called SmartLINK rather than by ankle monitor GPS, which is more expensive.

On a recent morning at the San Diego court, on the fourth floor of the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building, an ICE attorney moved to dismiss the case against one young woman, as the agency typically does before detaining someone after a hearing.

Tears in her eyes, the woman hugged loved ones before walking out the door to the officers waiting for her in the hallway. The officers took her to a holding cell in the basement of the building and then to Otay Mesa Detention Center. 

Meanwhile, Judge Amelia Anderson called another woman up for her hearing. She appeared terrified.

The woman had temporary protected status, according to her attorney, which means that the U.S. government cannot deport her while she still has that status because of conditions in her home country. The ICE attorney did not ask to dismiss her case, and Anderson set another hearing date a few months later. 

But, as the woman walked out of the courtroom and down the hallway, an ICE officer chased after her, asking for her name. 

He handed her a letter instructing her to report to the second floor, where ICE has offices for people who have appointments to check in. She waited in the office lobby, worrying what might happen to her. 

An officer emerged and called her name. She and her attorney followed him back through the door to the offices. When she emerged nearly an hour later, she had an ankle monitor on. It hurt her leg, she said, and she cried as she walked down the hallway.

Michel said that his client, too, was upset by the new requirement.

“His biggest frustration is like, ‘What else do you want? What do you want me to do?’” Olavo said.

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