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In May, I published an early report on ICEBlock, the iOS-exclusive app that allows you to anonymously notify other users of the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers within 5 miles of your location. Since then, the app has been on a wild journey. A June CNN segment on ICEBlock and its coder, Joshua Aaron, got the attention of Attorney General Pam Bondi, who told Sean Hannity that Aaron should “watch out”; the app subsequently topped the charts at Apple’s App Store, as Republicans demanded that Bondi investigate Aaron’s creation. Trump whisperer Laura Loomer also got involved, revealing the identity of Aaron’s wife and getting her fired from her job with the Justice Department. The simultaneous trends of liberal uptake and conservative outrage continued until Oct. 2—when Bondi directly instructed Apple to remove ICEBlock from the App Store.
Not only did the Big Tech giant comply, but it also removed other apps with similar ICE-notification and -documentation functions, to the protests of myriad Americans. (Google’s Play Store, which never hosted ICEBlock, also followed suit with those other, similar apps.) By the time it was delisted, Aaron tells me, ICEBlock had “over 1.14 million users,” and it was “adding 15,000 to 20,000 a day.”
Yet while ICEBlock got blocked, it may not stay that way much longer.
On Monday, Aaron filed a federal lawsuit against Bondi and three other Trump administration officials, including White House “border czar” Tom Homan, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accusing them of violating the First Amendment by coercing a private entity to censor speech and threatening prosecution over the exercise of protected speech. The 39-page suit, which requests a jury trial, asks the D.C. court to bar the Trump administration from demanding that Apple delist ICEBlock, or any similar immigration-advocacy app, ever again. The filing also requests relief on behalf of Aaron himself and his ALL U Chart company, which formally owns ICEBlock. The two plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Sher Tremonte, the law firm that recently won a federal court judgment ruling Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s efforts to detain and deport pro-Palestine student protesters to be unconstitutional free speech violations.
“We’re seeking a declaratory judgment that this kind of coercion and the threats of prosecution against Joshua violate the First Amendment,” Sher Tremonte lead counsel Noam Biale told me. “And we are seeking an injunction from the court to prevent the government officials whom we’re suing from doing those things again.”
No one will know for a while yet whether the district court will even take the case up. Assuming it does, Aaron says, “the biggest goal here is to set a precedent”—to get the sort of judgment that could apply to ICEBlock and to the other ICE-related apps that have been taken down at the request of the feds. (Aaron adds, however, that he doesn’t plan to have other plaintiffs join his suit for now.)
Despite the popularity of platforms like the ICE video archive Eyes Up and the interactive crowdsourced map People Over Papers, it does seem that ICEBlock remains the central symbol of this digital movement. Just this Friday, the House Committee on Homeland Security sent letters to the CEOs of Apple and Google, accusing them of still hosting “apps that allow users to report and disseminate data to reveal the location and identification of DHS law enforcement.” By way of erroneous example, the letter exclusively mentions ICEBlock, which does not collect or display anybody’s identity. But to the committee, that app has a special notoriety.
“As you are aware … ICEBlock was used by a gunman to track the movement of ICE agents prior to a deadly shooting in September at an ICE facility in Dallas,” the lawmakers write, pointing to the incident where a 29-year-old Oklahoman purportedly wished to attack ICE agents but ended up killing two detainees and himself.
To be clear, there was no evidence that the shooter used ICEBlock at any point; FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted after the incident that the gunman had “searched for apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents,” per USA Today. That pretext then inspired Bondi to again call out the media-famous ICEBlock in particular and get Apple to take it down. At the time, Apple told Fox Digital that “information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock” spurred the company to delist the app. The newsletter Migrant Insider later reported, citing “internal correspondence” Apple had sent to a different developer, that App Store moderators now treated federal officers as a “targeted group” on par with typically recognized marginalized ethnicities and identities (race, sexual orientation, origin), using that justification to deplatform apps with “location information … that can be used to harm” ICE agents.
That takedown alert was addressed to Deicer, a tool that “provides real-time alerts about ICE sightings through community reports, giving users the option to be an ‘observer’ and keep an eye out for authorities,” according to Syracuse University’s Daily Orange. But the same App Store guideline about “targeted groups” had already been weaponized against ICEBlock, per the lawsuit—and this was how “the first known instance of Apple removing U.S.-based apps in response to U.S. government demands” came about. (That being said, public means of tracking airplanes used by ICE are still available.)
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“Nothing had changed about ICEBlock, after all that vetting from their legal team over that five-week period of time” before it first hit the App Store, as Aaron told me. “They didn’t provide any evidence of law enforcement being targeted. They didn’t give me any information about what specifically they were provided by law enforcement.”
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As Aaron also pointed out, the government’s rhetoric around ICEBlock tends to be either misinformed or disingenuous. Bondi told the Senate that Americans used the app to “post where ICE officers lived” (even though it did not pinpoint agents’ home residences) and claiming the DOJ also “worked with” Google to remove ICEBlock (even though it was never listed on the Play Store). The House committee’s letter to the Big Tech firms cited the Supreme Court’s landmark Brandenburg v. Ohio decision to imply that ICEBlock was not covered by free-speech statutes, as a supposed example of advocacy “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” or likely to do so.
The lawsuit counters such arguments by pointing out that the app does not upload or store any media or user data, and has time-limit guardrails for reporting. Plus, there’s a disclaimer stating that the app is “not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.” Whether that will be enough to restore ICEBlock—itself classified as a form of speech in the suit—is yet to be seen.
Meanwhile, for anyone who still has ICEBlock on their phones, the app is still usable, Aaron says. “Yes, I cannot issue updates and you can’t download it again,” he added. “But we want to encourage people to still use it. It’s still just as private and anonymous as it ever was.”
