María is 21. She is seeking asylum. She has never been convicted of a crime. For nearly two years, an ankle monitor has cut into her skin, buzzed her awake at night, and told U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement exactly where she is standing at any given moment — information ICE already has, since the monitor's companion app also runs her face through a recognition check on command. Employers, informed of the hardware before they are informed of anything else about her, have declined to hire her. One presumes they assumed the ankle bracelet meant what ankle bracelets usually mean. It does not, in this case. It means she applied for asylum.
The Algorithm Doesn't Do Backstory
SmartLINK, the geolocation-and-facial-recognition system ICE has expanded across the Bay Area, now tracks more than 20,800 immigrants in the San Francisco area of responsibility alone — the vast majority of whom, like María, have no criminal record at all. The Algorithm does not check for that. It checks for a face and a coordinate, on a schedule, and it does not particularly care whether the person underneath the bracelet has ever so much as gotten a parking ticket. Even now, ICE has offered no public criteria for who gets the app, who gets the bracelet, and who gets both. The only trend line that is clear is the one going up.
A Growth Industry, Loosely Defined
And yet — as if this were not enough — immigration attorneys note that the program's expansion tracks suspiciously well with the fortunes of the private contractors who manufacture and service the devices. Someone is billing the government per unit, per day, per person monitored, dear reader, and that someone has every incentive to see the program grow regardless of whether it accomplishes anything it claims to. Sources within the immigration legal aid community describe a system that expands with the confidence of a subscription service that auto-renews whether or not you use it.
The Research Says What Research Usually Says
In a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, the data do not support the premise. Studies cited by legal aid organizations find that electronic monitoring barely improves court-appearance rates over simply providing people with legal representation — a service that, unlike the ankle monitor, does not draw blood. Immigration attorneys confirm the obvious: people show up to court because they have lawyers and something at stake, not because a machine can find them if they don't.
María still wears the monitor. It still tracks her, dear reader, with the tireless dedication of a system built for a threat that was never actually there. The Algorithm has no opinion on that. It just checks the coordinates.
Sources: Mission Local — ICE steps up surveillance of immigrants with increased electronic monitoring · KALW — Thousands of Bay Area immigrants under cyber surveillance
