Students with the Immigration Clinic prepared a report on behalf of the American Bar Association Commission on Immigration critiquing the Department of Homeland Security’s widespread electronic monitoring of migrants through ankle monitors and the SmartLINK phone app.
As of December 2023, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was electronically monitoring more than 190,000 migrants. A 2022 study showed most of those being monitored were asylum seekers from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. While the government asserts that electronic monitoring is a cost-effective “alternative to detention,” the report calls monitoring “de facto detention” that imposes “a significant financial cost on taxpayers and a considerable human toll on the participants and their family members.”
Such monitoring is unnecessary, the report says, because most migrants “present neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community to justify either detention or electronic monitoring.” The authors propose that electronic monitoring be “significantly reduced and only used in extraordinary cases” — when a migrant would otherwise be subject to mandatory detention or where there is specific evidence that a migrant poses a substantial flight risk or danger to the community. “Electronic monitoring is not used as a true alternative to detention but a net-widening expansion of detention,” the report concludes. “The use of electronic monitoring should be reevaluated and limited.”