“ICEBlock”, an app that allows users to report sightings of ICE activity, has hit the top of the App Store charts for downloads. The app’s developer, Joshua Aaron, defends his reasons for making the mobile application and explains why the Trump administration isn’t happy with its rising popularity.

Wired reports:

US attorney general Pam Bondi was on Fox News Monday talking about ICEBlock, when she spoke directly about Aaron, the app’s sole developer. “We are looking at him,” she said. “And he better watch out.” Speaking alongside President Donald Trump outside a migrant detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida on Tuesday, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said the government was looking into prosecuting CNN.

“What they’re doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities and operations and we’re going to actually go after them and prosecute them,” she said. “What they’re doing, we believe, is illegal.”

But legal experts tell WIRED that ICEBlock falls under protected speech. “That is as basic and uncontroversial a First Amendment principle as they come,” says Alex Abdo, the litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “So, it’s pretty shocking to see federal law enforcement officials suggesting that there’s anything here to investigate.”

Scott Hechinger, a civil rights attorney, says prosecuting the app’s creator would be illegal.

“Threatening people, in this case companies and projects, with arrest and retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights is profoundly illegal and unconstitutional,” he says. He points to past media appearances from border czar Tom Homan, where Homan condemned congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for sharing information about the immigrants’ legal rights, as emblematic of the administration’s lack of respect for constitutionality. [Continue reading…]