ICEBlock: This iPhone app alerts users to nearby ICE sightings
Joshua Aaron has worked in and around the tech industry for around two decades. He built his first app — a blackjack game — at computer camp when he was 13.
His newest app is designed for a very different purpose: to let users alert people nearby to sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their area.
Aaron launched the platform, called ICEBlock, in early April after watching President Donald Trump’s administration begin its immigration crackdown. The White House’s immigration policies have sparked mass protests across the United States; a CNN poll in April showed 52% of Americans polled said Trump has gone too far in deporting undocumented immigrants.
ICEBlock currently has more than 20,000 users, many of whom are in Los Angeles, where controversial, large-scale deportation efforts have taken place.
“When I saw what was happening in this country, I wanted to do something to fight back,” Aaron told CNN, adding that the deportation efforts feel, to him, reminiscent of Nazi Germany. “We’re literally watching history repeat itself.”
ICEBlock is designed to be an “early warning system” for users when ICE is operating nearby, Aaron said. Users can add a pin on a map showing where they spotted agents — along with optional notes, like what officers were wearing or what kind of car they were driving. Other users within a five-mile radius will then receive a push alert notifying them of the sighting. [Continue reading…]
Johnny Noviello moved from Canada to Daytona Beach when he was 10 years old. He grew up in Florida and became a lawful permanent resident.
On Monday, June 23, he died at the Federal Detention Center in downtown Miami, after six weeks in immigration detention.
Noviello, 49, is the ninth person to die in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since the beginning of the year, and the fourth to die in a Florida facility.
Federal agents blasted their way into a residential home in Huntington Park, California, on Friday. Security-camera video obtained by the local NBC station showed border patrol agents setting up an explosive device near the door of the house and then detonating it – causing a window to be shattered. About a dozen armed agents in full tactical gear then charged toward the home.
Jenny Ramirez, who lives in the house with her boyfriend and one-year-old and six-year-old children, told NBC through tears that it was one of the loudest explosions she heard in her life.
“I told them, ‘You guys didn’t have to do this, you scared my son, my baby,’” Ramirez said.
Ramirez said she was not given any warning from the authorities that they wanted to enter her home and that everyone who lives there is a US citizen.
In a notification sent to Congress over the weekend, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement revealed that a 75-year-old Cuban national named Isidro Perez died while in ICE custody on June 26. The death, which appears to have been caused by a heart attack, is “still under investigation,” according to the notification, which was sent our way by a congressional aide.
Obviously, the man’s age immediately makes it look odd that he was in ICE detention in the first place. But here’s something else that’s striking about this case: According to the ICE note, the man was first paroled into the United States in 1966.
Yes, you read that right. The man has been here for almost 60 years—and he appears to have been around 16 years old when he first arrived from Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Whatever is learned about the death, those details are going to raise serious questions about the deployment of law enforcement resources under Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s dragnet. Miller has been ordering ICE officials to drive up the deportation numbers to the highest possible levels, and detaining a 75-year-old man who has been here for longer than a half-century is apparently what this has come to entail.
Detentions of immigrants without criminal histories have risen sharply since May amid a broader push to expand immigration enforcement, according to a CBS News analysis of data from the Department of Homeland Security.
White House adviser Stephen Miller announced a push for a new, higher target of 3,000 arrests daily in late May. From the first week of May to the first week of June, new ICE detentions of people facing only civil immigration charges, such as entering the country without authorization, rose by over 250%.
President Trump has repeatedly said his administration is focusing deportation efforts on criminals. Until recently, federal agents working to enforce his orders have detained more immigrants with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges than those without them each week, the data shows.
But even among those with criminal convictions — about 40% of detainees since Jan. 20 — the majority were not for violent offenses. Overall, roughly 8% of all detainees had been convicted of violent crimes, CBS News found.