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.
The 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.
By regularly filing multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to federal agencies such as ICE, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and federal judges, 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.
“What lies behind ICE’s frequent posting of Alternatives to Detention (ATD) data that the agency now admits was incorrect?
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,” the TRAC report said.
“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,” the report continued.
“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,” the report said.
“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,” the report said.
According to the most recently available data from ICE, the agency had issued tracking monitors to 293,167 individuals as of February 25, 2023, compared to 376,305 as of Dec. 31, 2022, according to TRAC, which warned that it is still in the process of analyzing source documents.
The misreporting was not limited to ankle monitor usage. Usage of other ATD technologies, including SMART-Link and VoiceID to track 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!” according to TRAC.
The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is part, did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request 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 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,” according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Resident Fellow Andrew Arthur.
“’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. [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] CBP 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,” he said.