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Dena Temple Raston
From recorded future news and prx, this is click here.
Jay
They said it was something with my gps, my ankle monitor.
Dena Temple Raston
For two years, Jay had worn a GPS tracker around his ankle. He had followed the rules, reported when he was supposed to report, answered when he was supposed to answer. And in all that time, he'd never gotten a call like this one.
Jay
I never really had that problem with them, you know, especially in the manner that they called me. So I was. I was kind of shaky.
Dena Temple Raston
They told him to come into the office immediately. And that presented Jay with a strange problem. The rules said he had to go, but something about the call was telling him not to. So your spidey sense was going crazy?
Jay
Yeah, it was really tingling.
Dena Temple Raston
And Jay had reason to be nervous because by then people in his exact situation had started disappearing. They'd get a call, they'd show up where they were told, they'd follow the rules, and that was how ICE found them. From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click Here, a podcast about the people making and breaking our digital world. I'm Dena Temple Raston. Today a story about a surveillance system that was supposed to give people more freedom. And what happens when the people easiest to find are the ones doing exactly what the government told them to do. We'll be right back. Support for Click Here comes from Decagon. Decagon helps companies create personalized concierge style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice and SMS. They're available 24, 7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Workflows can be updated using natural language so teams can make changes themselves without long engineering cycles. That means less time spent managing workflows, more time focused on customers and roi. In weeks. Once they're live, agents can pull up to date information, take action on requests, and understand the context behind any conversation. Also, Decagon gives your team full visibility into why agents make decisions and what's happening across every conversation, so it's easy to spot trends and improve the experience over time. Decagon helps power millions of conversations every day for brands you know and love, including Avis, Affirm, Fanatics, and Aura. Ready to transform your customer support. Go to decagonaic to get a personalized demo and see what Decagon can do for your team. Check Decagon out at Decagon AI Clickhere. That's Decagon AI Clickhere. Support for Qlik here comes from Nord Security. Here's the Challenge IT Teams need to see what's happening in browsers, but they can't slow anyone down or disrupt their workflow. Nord layer browser solves this. It gives IT teams full visibility and control over browser activity, while keeping everything familiar and fast. For employees, two products work together. Nord layer provides the Secured network Foundation. Then Nord layer browser extends that into the workflow, managing web apps, sessions, and data. The payoff. Every browser session becomes visible, controlled, and secure. Company data stays protected. Access to sensitive resources is managed. Accidental data leaks are prevented. And it works for all kinds of teams, remote workers, contractors, people using their own devices, all secured without the complex setup or device management. Go to nordlayer.com Browser clickhere and unlock your 10% discount on Nordlayer browser with coupon code clickhere10 that's nordlayer.com Browser Clickhere
Narrator/Reporter
and enter coupon code.
Dena Temple Raston
Click here10 at checkout. Jay came to the United States from Guyana as a teenager, and he had a pretty clear idea of what he thought life here would be be like.
Jay
I expect betterment, success, happiness. I mean, these are the things you think about in your head, you know, going to, well, a country like this, place that's supposed to be a little bit more advanced.
Narrator/Reporter
He settled in New Jersey, found a neighborhood, joined a soccer team, got a job. And for a while, life was simple, predictable, exactly the future he'd imagined when he boarded that plane. Then a couple of minor marijuana charges knocked everything sideways. He paid the fines, served a short sentence, and when he stood in front of a judge, it looked like he was finally getting his life back.
Jay
The judge gave you paperwork and say, you're free to go. Report to me and make sure you come to court and follow all the rules.
Narrator/Reporter
He thought he understood the steps, walked downstairs, hand in the papers, go home. But immigration cases don't always end where you think they will. And when you reach the counter, they
Jay
said, you're not going nowhere. ICE put a hold on you.
Narrator/Reporter
ICE intervening. That was totally confusing to Jay because he was a lawful permanent resident, a green card holder. He paid taxes, he worked. He'd built a life.
Jay
Here, the word permanent means permanent. So in my head, I thought that was it.
Narrator/Reporter
But with that one sentence at the counter, everything shifted. Immigration law treats certain convictions, even minor ones, as grounds to reexamine a person's status. Jay's charges were minor, but they were enough. So in the moment he thought he was walking out, back to his wife,
Dena Temple Raston
his kids, his routines.
Narrator/Reporter
He was sent back into custody instead, this time to an ICE detention facility at A time when Covid was surging and staff was stretched thin and the whole place felt like it was coming apart.
Jay
Everybody's in the open, like a gym with bunk beds. It's like anybody could, you know, crazy stuff go on in there. You know, there's violence in there, too.
Dena Temple Raston
Jay tried to keep to himself. He tried to stay healthy. He tried not to think about how little control he had. So when an officer mentioned there was another option, a program that might let him leave the facility, he listened. And that program was called Alternatives to Detention.
Priscilla Abraham
Alternatives to Detention is a way for ICE to continue to monitor your whereabouts, your address, where you work without you having to physically be detained.
Dena Temple Raston
That's Priscilla Abraham. She's a supervising attorney specializing in immigrant rights at the American Friends Service Committee. And many of her clients are enrolled in a part of the Alternatives to Detention system known as isap, or the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. The key words here are intensive and supervision. Because Jay was about to learn that leaving detention wasn't the same thing as being free. And that's how he ended up with a tracker, A thick plastic band around his ankle, the kind you usually see on tv.
Technical Expert/Announcer
The transmitter is to be worn around
Dena Temple Raston
your ankle at all times.
Technical Expert/Announcer
It must not cross this line.
Narrator/Reporter
Jay got one of those. A hard plastic cuff with a transmitter about the size of a deck of cards snapped shut against his skin. And to his relief, he was released. Under the ISAP program we mentioned before. It allows offenders to leave physical custody and monitors them digitally instead. Most of the people in the program are nonviolent offenders, but Jay's relief didn't last long.
Dena Temple Raston
And so what did you think having an ankle monitor would be like?
Jay
I was happy the time when I hear I was getting the ankle monitor to come home, but then experiencing the rules and regulation that it comes with, it was very stressful. You know, my regular life was on hold.
Narrator/Reporter
Ankle monitors are often sold as a cost saving alternative to detention. It costs roughly $4 a day to track someone electronically, compared to $150 a day to hold them in a detention center. ICE says tools like ISAP help ensure that people show up to their court dates while allowing them to stay home with their families. But Jay discovered home with an ankle monitor can feel a lot like its own kind of jail. Yes, he was back with his family. He slept in his own bed. He could cook his own food. But the freedom that came with serious caveats. The battery pack would heat up, sometimes burning his skin.
Jay
After being on your foot for a long time, it irritates your foot. Because you're showering with this thing on your feet. You're doing everything with this thing on your feet, you know.
Narrator/Reporter
The plastic band dug into his ankle,
Jay
so I had to. I was back and forth at the office whenever it was bothering me so that they could adjust it.
Narrator/Reporter
And then there was the stigma. People didn't see bureaucracy when they looked at that monitor. They saw danger. Even though those ankle monitors are largely reserved for nonviolent offenders.
Jay
I never wear a shirt. I always covered mine, you know. Cause I was kind of embarrassed.
Narrator/Reporter
Embarrassment aside, he was able to get a job.
Jay
I worked one job while I was on the ankle monitor for a while, which is for the ice company.
Dena Temple Raston
Different ice. The cold ice?
Jay
Yes, the cold ice. The block. Yeah, the ice company. You know, I was working for them for like a year.
Narrator/Reporter
But even that came with strings, long digital ones.
Jay
I had to make sure that I'm home until I receive a call from the supervising officer. And I had to let them know two weeks ahead if I'm going to another state. If you miss her, you don't follow. You're going to get in trouble.
Dena Temple Raston
As Jay navigated life with the black plastic tracker around his ankle, it beamed his location to a company called BI Incorporated. It's a subsidiary of the private prison giant Geo Group. If the name rings a bell, it should, because this past spring, protesters clashed with federal agents outside an immigration center in Newark, New Jersey that was run by the company.
BBC Interface Host
The Delaney hall standoff is escalating. Tear gas, rubber bullets, and a nightly curfew is now in place.
Dena Temple Raston
Inside the facility, detainees launched a hunger strike. And outside protesters demanded it be shut down and called for Geo Group to be held accountable for what was going on inside.
Priscilla Abraham
They're a third party contractor that actually gives out the ankle bracelets or puts the actual application on the phone or they were rolling out for a time. Smartwatch looking tracking device.
Narrator/Reporter
That's Priscilla Abraham again. She helped manage Jay's case. And bi, the company that monitored his comings and goings, didn't build this system for immigrants. It was built to track livestock, wildlife, animals that needed to be kept within certain boundaries. And ankle monitors are only one small part of a much bigger ecosystem. A network of apps, databases, and third party contractors that allow ICE to extend its reach far beyond physical custody. Because immigration enforcement isn't just happening in detention centers anymore. It has quietly migrated into the digital world using technology from private companies like BI Incorporated. It runs isaap's day to day operations. But everything they do seems designed to feel like a government agency. Priscilla says that's hardly accidental.
Dena Temple Raston
ISAAP calls them officers, which makes them sound like they're government and they're not.
Narrator/Reporter
Is that right?
Priscilla Abraham
Yes.
Narrator/Reporter
Jay was assigned one of those ISAP officers. And for two years, he built a routine around a device designed to interrupt routines. He learned to time showers between battery charges, to plan errands around curfews, and to ignore the looks. Then one afternoon, the phone rang.
Dena Temple Raston
This was the call you heard about at the beginning of our story. Something was supposedly wrong with Jay's ankle monitor, and ISAP wanted him to come in immediately. The device around his ankle didn't just tell ICE where he was. It meant that ICE could tell him where to go. So he called his lawyer.
Jay
I didn't want to go, and I asked her, can she come with me?
Dena Temple Raston
And his lawyer was worried, too, because she. She knew something Jay didn't. Other people had gotten calls like this. They had gone where they were told, and they hadn't come home.
Narrator/Reporter
When we come back.
Dena Temple Raston
Why following the rules had suddenly become the thing Jay was most afraid of. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Serval. Every company says AI will make employees more productive. But most employees are still stuck waiting on it, waiting for app access and password resets, waiting for someone to fix a laptop issue so they can get back to work. That operational drag adds up fast, and IT teams are overwhelmed trying to keep up. Servl was built to change that. You describe what you want in plain English and Servl builds it for you. No complicated workflow, no consultants, just faster support and fewer tickets slowing everybody down. The platform is designed to eliminate repetitive tickets so it can focus on strategic work instead of constant firefighting. And unlike traditional automation tools, Servol doesn't require consultants or long implementation cycles. Servol positions it as the AI powered operational backbone of the company, not just a support function. Learn more or start a free four week pilot at serval.com clickhere that's S E R V A L.com clickhere servol.com
Jay
clickhere if there was a big red button that would just demolish the Internet, I would smash that button with my forehead.
BBC Interface Host
From the BBC, this is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.
Dena Temple Raston
This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.
BBC Interface Host
It's about what technology is actually doing to your work, your politics, your everyday
Jay
life, and all the bizarre ways people are using the Internet.
BBC Interface Host
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dena Temple Raston
Welcome back. When Jay called Priscilla Abraham to say Isaac wanted him to come in, something didn't sit right with her.
Priscilla Abraham
He's had that ankle monitor for two years at that point. And suddenly during the Trump administration, there's all of a sudden an issue with the ankle monitor. It just didn't make sense at the moment.
Dena Temple Raston
And in two other cases she knew of, what came next was detention.
Priscilla Abraham
We had had two people in a similar situation who had gone to their ICE check ins and have been detained. So we were scared that one client
Narrator/Reporter
was told his GPS wasn't working. They asked him to go outside to see if the reception got better.
Priscilla Abraham
And when he stepped outside, there was multiple ICE officers there waiting to arrest him.
Dena Temple Raston
The man had done exactly what he was told, and that was the trap. They didn't just ask him to step outside. They asked him to step beyond the boundaries set by the court. And once he'd crossed that line, ICE could say he violated the terms of his release. And it wasn't an isolated incident. We spoke with a former ISEP case manager, someone who used to be on the inside, and she told us that ICE agents would sometimes ask her to call clients and say their monitors were being removed.
Saira Hussain
Exactly.
Narrator/Reporter
That kind of thing happened in Chicago.
BBC Interface Host
This building right here behind me, that is the ISAP office. ICE agents showed up here armed and masked, arriving with no notice and detaining people who they who thought that they were coming here for a normal case review. But that was not the case. And this morning, that fallout is still unfolding.
Dena Temple Raston
Again, the people being detained had shown up because they were told to. Which raises a question. Why go after people in a program designed largely for nonviolent offenders? People whose cases were still working their way through the system? Advocates have a theory. People in ISAP programs are an easy way to meet steep enforcement quotas. The Department of Homeland Security is raising its daily arrest quotas for ice agents
Narrator/Reporter
to 3,000 arrests per day.
Dena Temple Raston
And there is still a DHS recently tweaked that number. Their quota is now apparently 2,000 arrests a day. And over a five day period in July, they claim to have arrested some 10,000 people. And who's easier to arrest than someone whose location you already know?
Priscilla Abraham
The lowest hanging fruit are people who are on GPS monitoring, going to their ICE check ins, living their life, driving to work. Those are the easiest people to arrest.
Dena Temple Raston
But the ankle monitor around Jay's leg is only the most visible part of this system. The technology is getting much easier to hide because now the tracker can Be something. Almost everybody carries a phone.
Saira Hussain
In the last several years, there's been this explosion of individuals who are now on not just the ankle monitors, but also downloading onto their own phones an app called BI SmartLink that effectively tracks people.
Narrator/Reporter
This is Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. BI SmartLink is an app. It requires you to send selfies or click on a check in link, sometimes several times a day. On the surface, it seems like a better option. No clunky, embarrassing ankle monitor, no stigma. But Sayra warns it raises a whole new set of concerns, because SmartLink isn't a separate device. It's something you install on your own personal phone.
Saira Hussain
So there's questions about what parts of the phone that it has access to. So, like, for instance, does it have access to the call logs? You know, does it have access to the people that you're maybe associating with because of your. Either your location or your call history or your text messages?
Narrator/Reporter
ICE hasn't laid out precisely what it collects or how when we asked, they
Dena Temple Raston
pointed us to a report.
Narrator/Reporter
And it contains only little hints. It mentions, for example, voice prints, continuous tracking, even DNA samples from migrant children, all stored in a massive government database, the kind of material you might gather on someone suspected of a serious crime, not families navigating civil immigration cases. Saira is alarmed at how fast this has all escalated.
Saira Hussain
There were norms and laws in place for decades because that's exactly the kind of use of government that you don't want. And so to see that break down so quickly and easily and for agencies to fold and not uphold those principles is really worrisome. And so like.
Narrator/Reporter
And she worries that this is just the beginning.
Saira Hussain
When you see data protection breakdowns for immigrant communities, for undocumented people, for people who are at risk of deportation, it doesn't stop there. It means that they're going to continue trying to push those barriers and eventually starting to impact others who have other types of status.
Dena Temple Raston
Jay was exactly the kind of person she was talking about. A permanent resident, a green card holder. And still on the morning of his appointment, he had no idea whether he was walking into an equipment check or an arrest.
Jay
She was letting us know, well, you not in no trouble. You're not here for that. We just had to check the ankle monitor and, you know, she said she wasn't receiving no signals.
Narrator/Reporter
They swapped out the old one for a new one. And Jay went home as a precaution. Jay had a lawyer from Priscilla's office at the appointment too. Maybe that made the difference. Or maybe the ICE agents had met their quota that day. Or maybe it was just dumb luck. A few months later, Jay's case was dismissed, his green card status restored, and he hasn't had any run ins since.
Dena Temple Raston
But tens of thousands of people are still wearing ankle monitors like Jay's. Hundreds of thousands more are being tracked by apps, smartwatches and GPS beacons. The programs are called alternatives to detention, and technically that's what they are. Jay got to go home. But for two years the government always knew where he was and one day it called and told him where to go. That's the strange thing about a system like this. You don't have to disappear for it to find you. You just have to follow the rules. This is quick here.
Jay
Foreign.
Narrator/Reporter
Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Cavedo and fact checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonger. I'm Dina Tumble Raston, and thanks for listening.
Saira Hussain
Support for this program comes from Recorded Future. In cybersecurity, the biggest risk isn't what
Dena Temple Raston
can be seen in it's what gets missed.
Saira Hussain
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Podcast Summary: Click Here – "The Surveillance Trap"
Recorded Future News | Released July 24, 2026
Host: Dina Temple-Raston
In "The Surveillance Trap," host Dina Temple-Raston takes listeners into the hidden world of electronic monitoring and “alternatives to detention” in the U.S. immigration system. Through Jay’s personal story, the episode explores how programs meant to offer freedom outside jail often turn into high-tech forms of control, expanding the reach of authorities into daily life. The story uncovers how technologies designed for animals or logistics are now overseeing people—raising questions about surveillance, privacy, and the nature of freedom.
"The Surveillance Trap" exposes how electronic monitoring alternatives, pitched as humane reforms, often become new forms of restriction and fear. Through Jay’s experiences and expert perspectives, the episode highlights how digital tools blur the lines between supervision and surveillance—and how well-intentioned technology can morph into mechanisms that catch people not when they break the rules, but when they comply.
This summary covers the podcast's substantive narrative, skipping over advertisements and non-content remarks for clarity and coherence.