Private Company Hired to Surveil U.S. Immigrants Riddled With Failures

While the government has entrusted its Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (Isap), a surveillance system launched in 2004 and pitched as a way to keep immigrants out of detention centers while they await a court hearing on their legal status, to a single private enterprise known as “BI”, acquired by private prison corporation the Geo Group in 2011, a recent investigation by The Guardian reports that the for-profit surveillance operation can work against those required to participate and often prioritizes the company’s revenue-driving technology over helping immigrants navigate the process.

The investigation has found that while monitoring as many as 300 people at once, BI case managers often don’t have enough time to offer immigrants tailored support and some are even discouraged by managers from doing so; BI’s ankle monitors can overheat, have shocked people, and at times are put on too tightly by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice); BI’s app frequently malfunctions, causing immigrants to miss required check-ins; and there are few protocols governing case managers’ decisions, even though they have enormous repercussions in immigrants’ daily lives. The US government pays BI hundreds of millions of dollars a year to run Isap, the company signed a new five-year contract with Ice for nearly $2.2bn in 2020, and the Biden administration is expanding Isap to include new levels of supervision such as strict curfews. As of January, more than 182,600 people were enrolled in Isap, more than 60,000 of whom entered the program in just the preceding few months.