Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater

The methods ICE is using currently to detain people for deportation look a lot like secret police tactics for disappearing folks and resemble kidnapping, when a van full of armed men with face masks jump out and remove you from your vehicle, zip-tie you, and transport you to a secret facility.

There have also been reported situations of ICE officers breaking windows of cars and pulling folks out, when all they had was an administrative warrant.

And that doesn’t include the recently reported and videoed situation of an ICE agent firing at a vehicle that was stopped by ICE agents.

All of these tactics increase fear among the populace, and that fear is what drives apps like these. Whether you’re here legally or not, no one deserves the secret police tactics that fly in the face of the principles of limited government and freedom of movement.

ICE has been going after low hanging fruit, ie arresting people when they go to their immigration court dates(aka following the rules).

> (1) can't they be taken to court?

Once arrested, ICE will ship people off to many states away(if you're european, imagine being arrested in the north of France and sent to a camp in southern Spain).

Once you are arrested by ICE, it's very difficult to be found. There is no arrest announcement or ability to call family. Basically you disappear into this system and if you have someone hire a lawyer, the lawyer essentially has to search for you in various prisons.

Sure they can be taken to court, but the arrestee wont see any restitution for the terrible conditions they were illegally forced into. If you do win in court( Kilmar Abrego), they'll send you somewhere even worse out of spite.

ICE officers have no badges. They wear masks. Sometimes they have no uniforms. They grab people off the streets, and stuff them into white vans. They may send those people to foreign prisons, even if a judge tells them not to. Some of the people they take are natural-born citizens.

Taking them to court works sometimes. But ICE will often attempt to move people out of state quickly, and they won't always say where those people went. And as I mentioned above, the administration has just straight-up ignored multiple court orders.

Courts are a cute legal fiction that only works if the people with guns agree to listen to them.

What we have instead is a regulation that almost prohibits immigration, but which has a whole bunch of grey areas, exceptions to the rule that qualify you for some special status, and courts that are overloaded by a factor of ~100 relative to what they would need to do their job, or overloaded by a factor of ~10 relative to what they would need to do a terrible pro forma job. While waiting for a court date (let's say you walk in and claim asylum) you are granted a special status by administrative custom which says that nobody is coming after you until after your status is adjudicated. Deportation is "deferred", and can be rescinded after the fact based on adjudication. Previous administrations have "prioritized violent crimes" for deportation, leaving about 20 million people at a time outside the system of legal permanent residency, and another 40 million of their family members who rely on them with legal status but precarious. Being custom rather than law, when Stephen Miller and his white supremacist posse comes in they can suspend that, and work at odds with the court and the process. They literally wait until these people check in with the courts and black bag them on their way out of the courtroom.

The US agricultural, construction, and food service sectors have come to almost completely rely on this system permitting either nominally illegal cash-under-the-table work, or "I can't actually prove he's illegal" work, or work performed under a green card sought after the delays and deferred prosecutions in that court date permit the immigrant to start a family and see their kids through college.

Sure, everything ultimately exist for some reason, but that doesn't mean everyone agrees with the reasoning :)

I don't know what the answer is (also an outsider), but I think there is a third possibility of people just disagreeing with the move of "Lets forcible check every single potentially illegal immigrant, so we can get rid of the illegal ones" from a purely humanitarian perspective, regardless if ICE might be abusing their power or if they're only removing illegal immigrants.

Edit: I'm wondering if positing two options like that is actually engagement bait of sorts, already we have two confident commentators saying "It's N of course" where N is both 1 and 2, and I myself fell into the trap of thinking of the third missing one :)

Yes, they can be and are being but it's not much comfort to know that the courts will decide a deportation was unlawful after you've already spent 6 months being tortured in an El Salvadoran prison.

They are also targeting other people with visas for violations both significant and trivial. Trivial meaning misspellings or typos on one of the dozens or hundreds of forms filled out at some point in the past.

Rule of law is being undermined, basically under the guise of whatever state of emergency is in place, they look to act quickly where any ambiguity exists and before courts get to weigh in.

> In case of (1) can't they be taken to court?

Well, no, that’s not something people think is an adequate remedy for the abuse, for a number of reasons, most notably that a high profile aspect of the abuse of power has been the Administration removing people in violation of court orders, publicly mocking the courts while doing so, and then using the fact that the people were no longer within the control of the US government as an excuse to argue that they were immune to further court orders with respect to those people. (Also the fact that people detained have at times been held incommunicado without access to attorneys and without the ability to notify people that and where they are held makes either the detained individual or anyone else challenging their detention in court difficult.)

> and surely we don't want to normalize selective application of law like in so many corrupt countries around the world?

We have that. That’s the problem the app is responding to.

> Isn't the rule of law a thing in the US?

Not particularly, in this area, no.

– There is evidence that there is a quota on arrests, [1], rather than deportations, although the administration has inconsistently denied that quotas exist (because it would help legal cases against their strategies.) [2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ices-tactics-draw-criticism...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/03/trump-admini...

– Therefore, there have been incidents, especially in targeted cities like LA, where citizens [1] and lawful permanent residents have arrested before being released after multiple days of detention [2], although this data is not systematically gathered, e.g.:

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-08/how-many...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/jemmy-jimenez-rosa-immigration-deta...

– Recourse to the courts in a meaningful, practical way is ineffective. The administration has ignored lawsuits where judges have issued injunctions against ICE dragnets due to plausible evidence that ICE dragnets target individuals who look Latin American, e.g.:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/06/ice-border-p...

The suspicion (although I need to look up a legal source) is that the administration intends to drag on legal cases as long as possible through appeals, perhaps even up to the Supreme Court, which will take months.

They are doing this. And, as other have noted, taking them to court is almost impossible. In at least one case, the government has shipped people off to another country after being told clearly by the courts that they are absolutely not allowed to do so. The current government is ignoring the laws, and the checks and balances that are supposed to prevent that are proving completely inadequate; mostly because the people that would enforce that have chosen to support these illegal activities.

> 2) ICE is deporting illegal immigrants which don't have permission to be in the country... aren't immigration laws there for a reason

Yes, but it's more complicated than that. Specifically, the immigration laws are not up to the task. The US relies on undocumented/illegal workers for a significant portion of it's economy (farming being of particular note). Running rampant and arresting everyone that's here illegally has a huge negative impact.

> surely we don't want to normalize selective application of law

We do, unfortunately. The laws in the US are very frequently written to be of the variety that give broad (unnecessary) powers, and then say "well, they won't use them in a bad way". It's bad, and it should be pushed back against, but it is what it is. And the enforcement of those laws needs to be balanced against the well being of both individuals and society as a whole.

If it helps, consider that every US citizen breaks many laws every day. There's a writeup somewhere of how US citizens commit an average of 3 felonies per day. The sheer number of laws in the US, and the absolute ridiculousness of many of them, make it almost impossible _not_ to break laws.

Plus, undocumented immigrants are far less likely to break _other_ laws than the average US citizen. So "we must enforce the law" sounds good, but you'd need to arrest literally _everyone_ if you wanted to use it as a valid argument.

First of all, the immigration laws aren't rational. The states aren't "legal" and "illegal", but "documented" and "undocumented". It's often the case that The Official Way To Do Things can cause you to transition from a "documented" state to an "undocumented" state and back again while in the country. Part of what people like the author are trying to do is to help people who made the documented -> undocumented transition to complete their undocumented -> documented transition before ICE an export them somewhere.

Secondly, ICE has basically been given a target of 500k people to expel. They've always had a reputation for being more on the "bully / asshole" side than normal, and now those people have been given a blank check to crank it up to 11.

Finally, there are clear, documented cases of ICE breaking the law and then trying to play games to get around it. Go look up the Abrego-Garcia case:

1. He came in legally, and was documented -- he had a court order forbidding him from being extradited to El Salvador, and was checking in regularly.

2. They swept him up, erroneously identified him as a gang member, and shipped him out to El Salvador before anyone had a chance to do anything to protest

3. They admitted in court that extraditing him was a mistake; but then said, "Well, he's out of our jurisdiction now, we can't do anything to get him back."

4. When, after months of wrangling, they finally did bring him back, they decided to charge him with a crime for something he did years ago (even though they didn't decide to charge him with anything back then, and had plenty of opportunities to do so earlier).

So basically, 1) The immigration laws are broken: not just and not really follow-able 2) ICE often don't follow the law unless browbeaten by the courts to do so 3) they often try to entirely avoid the courts by playing jurisdictional games.

There's a good reason that large numbers of intelligent, dedicated patriots are organizing to oppose ICE.

The Democrats are sort of pro-immigration. Though for some reason, they strongly support illegal immigration, and seek to decriminalize it through so-called "sanctuary cities", rather than starting serious efforts at making permanent legal immigration liberal and approachable for most people.

Illegal immigration comes with major problems. It's an avenue for organized crime, and a recipe for a major humanitarian crisis. It's a driving factor in the Opioid Epidemic. Most people are aware of this, which is part of why the Democrats lost.

So now the Republicans are in charge. They are anti-immigration, and want permanent immigration to be unreachable for 99% of people. They are now running mass-deportations of illegal immigrants. The grievance which opponents have with this is that they're actively looking for illegal immigrants who are otherwise doing nothing wrong, using military-style police, in a system which doesn't allow for easy legal immigration.

Most people are somewhere in the middle, but they have to pick between two extremes. A) unsecured borders which get taken advantage of by criminal gangs, or B) your local contractor Juan getting deported by military police.

Most illegal/undocumented immigrants in the US are otherwise productive and law-abiding. They have a job, they pay taxes. When they have kids here, their kids are citizens. What happens to that family when ICE deports a parent?

I live in DC. ICE has detained people in my neighborhood every day this week. Kids at my child’s school are now missing their parents. It seems to be the case that ICE is mostly pulling over drivers of work trucks and vans, and detaining anyone who’s brown-skinned and doesn’t have immigration papers on them (I’m white and was born here; I do not walk around with my birth certificate).

So, yes, both #1 and #2 are in play, but I would encourage you to question the underlying assumption that deporting illegal immigrants constitutes an unalloyed good. As a citizen, I don’t think it does and oppose these actions. I would happily provide a path to citizenship for any immigrant that had a good track record of living here peacefully and contributing.

Right, the problem is you're assuming immigration agents are following the law. You need to alert people of where they are to protect them. People who are actually here legally are being arrested, waiting for them outside courtrooms. There have been several cases of actual American citizens detained illegally based on racial profiling. There's no proper due process. Additionally, the treatment of those who are detained is very inhumane, using tactics to induce fear.

Remember there is a difference between legal and legitimate. You don't have to do something just because it is the law (well, you could define "have to" to mean what the law says, but then it becomes pretty circular).

Historically, often behavior changes before the applicable laws change. Think about the acceptance of gay relationships, or the use of cannabis. If people don't sometimes break the law, society can't evolve. That doesn't mean the rule of law has to break down. I think the rule of law is very important and would uphold it in most cases, but there are certain cases where conscience might order one to break or circumvent a law.

Not so much these days...

Most of it is (1), but even in the case of (2) the problem is that this is an outlaw organization which is not following any established law or process.

Legally, deporting people who are here out of status is fine. But to do that properly, you'd have to establish proof of who they are and why they are out of status, in front of an immigration court. ICE bypasses all that and just sends masked unidentified thugs to the street to grab people left and right and disappear them into secret detention centers with no access to lawyers. About as illegal behavior as it gets.

The reason people want to avoid ICE is the same reason you have a smoke detector: Even if you do everything right, a fire can still happen and when it does you're happy you had it.

The US constitution guarantees certain rights to any person on their soil, without them having to be citizens. These rights are currently being violated with approval of at least two branches of government.

ICE must act within the bounds of the legal system. If you are unhappy with their actions, an election is the remedy.

Actions like this app are not the right way to ‘fix’ things and are probably unproductive.

Many of them have lived here for decades, work peacefully, and have built lives. Many of them have married citizen spouses, and also have children who are citizens.

They are friends, neighbors, and colleagues. They are often the best and most ambitious among us.

It would be an ethical, moral, and humanitarian catastrophe to suddenly expel all of them.

It would also be an economic disaster, as this population forms a disproportionate fraction of the labor force.

The price of goods and services would skyrocket if not outright be lost from the market forever. Inflation would obliterate savings.

The US immigration system is wildly irrational and violates the rights of American citizens. It must be radically reformed.

However, the greater evil isn’t that ICE is enforcing the law. It’s that they’re doing it in a reckless way that reeks of violating any sort of due process.

Lookup videos on YouTube of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Donated in the 1880's, it used to be 35 acre urban park oasis. Now it is a rodent infested drug haven. Between 4 PM and sunrise, the area is taken over by unlicensed street vendors and drug dealers, all of whom are controlled by Mexican cartel gangs using sidewalk landlords. You can purchase fentanyl in bulk, and walk one mile down the street and sell it for three times profit.

The surrounding area is mostly apartments, with no positive tax revenue base, residential or commercial. It has a population density four times Manhattan, New York, 50,000 in one square mile. 67% of residents in the community are unauthorized immigrants. 67% of children don't have a father. Most apartments are shared by two families. Only 20% of residents vote.

90% of fire department calls are overdose and illegal open bonfires set by homeless. 49% of street lights are disabled, the city estimates three years to fix. Building owners have to paint their exterior walls every day to remove gang signs. The Home Depot most profitable product is paint, even though it is id-restricted and locked up. Most of the people in the park long term are repeat criminal offenders. The city has converted the area into a de facto dumping ground for people released from jail.

Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass lives nearby.

A few weeks ago ICE made a cameo walk through trolling appearance for a few minutes, and everyone freaked out. Of course they didn't really do anything. How could they? It would require at least 500 police to sweep an area that large. Many in the park have weapons.

Bonus fact: The Tijuana River is actually in the US. It exits into the San Diego Bay watershed at Imperial Beach. 70 million gallons per day of untreated sewage, and several hundred million gallons of treated effluent per day. Even with the one water treatment plant in Tijuana Mexico, (population 2.3 million) funded by the US, and a second that the US had agreed to fund, this will not reduce the illegal sewage discharge, which is estimated to increase to 200 million? Oddly, it hasn't affected home prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacArthur_Park

How MacArthur Park Became LA's Most Dangerous Spot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0odHsJvSHZE

What Happened to MacArthur Park? The Rise and Fall of LA's Urban Oasis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ssU3tdAAH4

El Tijuana River National Estuarine "Research" Reserve https://maps.app.goo.gl/9gouGc9ge4ikYfgZA

Didn’t you see what has been done against Abrego Garcia, and how intent the administration is to ship him off to random other countries (and how they succeeded once!) even though the courts insist he should stay?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I see all the signs of Portuguese dictorship that ended in 1974, and I as first generation being raised in freedom got to hear and learn plenty of stories on how everything used to be.

Sadly also back home people have forgotten what it meant to live under authoritarian regime.

- A country they know is not on the same continent they came from.

- Directly into the death camp prison of a dictatorship.

- Unaccompanied minors without any coordination to have them picked up by any government officials on the other side. Woken up at 2AM and performed intentionally without the knowledge of the judicial system. No, I'm serious, this happened this morning in what they called "Operation Silent Harvest"

The gestapo here is whisking away people into black vans wearing ski masks without presenting warrants to anybody, taking them to secret camps and refusing them access to lawyers or the ability to inform family before just... sending them wherever before legal proceedings can confirm their status.

We've already seen them not only nab citizens or legal immigrants, but know a few have been attempted to or actually flown out of the country.

> Isn't the rule of law a thing in the US?

No, the "unitary executive" has clearly decided Trump is out king and may do whatever he wants. Including a secret police.

> can't they be taken to court?

It costs money, and the low hanging fruits of deportation are low-income families/individuals.

> In case of (1) can't they be taken to court? In case of (2) aren't immigration laws there for a reason

Police, courts and administration work until they don't. There have been cases of people arrested just because of racial profiling, which fits into Trump's racial vision.

The emblematic case IMO, has been the high-profile instance of an American citized deported because of an administrative mistake (!!); Trump has openly refused to apologize or take corrective action (!!!).

The real problem, if one accepts Oliver’s criticisms, is that this is not about law, it's about racial cleansing.

So many, many thousands of illegal immigrants (renamed 1984-style to "undocumented" by the media outlets who operate in lockstep with the Democrat party) have been allowed in, and have been sheltered by businesses who like below-minimum wage labour, and by democrat cities in general.

This means there's not much left to do when left-wing activists violently defend illegal immigrants from ICE removal other than escalating ICE activities to compensate.

Often, it is the people who don't understand protest who understand the least about government. Many have the idea that if a democratically elected government does something they don't like, violently overthrowing the government will solve the problem. If the next government is a democracy, the same people will vote for the same policies.

A group proposes to build simple, affordable housing and funds it. Then another group comes along and says that people with affordable housing deserve energy-efficient, low-cost-to-run homes, so the plans get upgraded with better windows and walls, and the cost doubles. Then another group comes along and says that affordable housing should be green with solar panels and battery power. And another group says that all affordable housing should be fully accessible, so the size of all doorways is upgraded. And another group says that affordable housing should be ecologically beneficial, so now the housing requires a green roof and rainwater collection. And so on, until the cost is 5x the original cost and the project never gets built, and a bunch of time is wasted.

This is the risk. Each group along the way had noble motives, but by trying to solve every problem at once, nothing gets done and no one gets helped. By contrast, politics that are instead centered on tearing down systems and rules don't have this, because any random action is a step towards the goal.

I feel like this is happening here to a degree. Instead of producing a functional alternative, this well-intentioned person is picking apart all the problems with the current approach. They may be 100% "correct" in their assessments, but politically, they are letting the air out of their own balloon.

Heh, makes me think of "Full Self Driving"...

To make an analogy, if someone wants to start a taxi service and you say they're not qualified because they don't know about different types of tires and how to change the front lights, that would be gatekeeping. If they don't know you should sometimes change tires and turn the lights on when it's dark you should have doubts about their ability to safely run a taxi service.

You could argue that he doesn't need open source and a warranty canary, but from what Micah says, it sounds like the app author doesn't have the required knowledge to evaluate the option.

Often the best work comes out theough competition and revisions. Google didnt sit back and write sniveling blog posts abt how lame altavista was.

Just think of all the societal progress we are potentially missing out on if only more people would think of those who flaunt the laws that a nation has democratically decided upon.

If I was law enforcement, didn't like people reporting on my activities, and I saw Apple's boss getting cozy with my boss, I'd be eager to start getting help knowing exactly who is reporting me. And considering how the app works (using Apple's servers, with identifiable information), I'm pretty sure people using this app is helping someone, maybe not the ones we should be cheering on though.

A VM can't spoof on-device attestation.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/establ...

It's still possible to do do Sybil attacks, but you need real devices, not VMs.

AFAIK courts have ruled that flashing your high beams to warn people of speed traps is protected under the first amendment. If that's protected, I don't see why warning people of ICE traps isn't protected either.

2) not sure this is a question. People are predominantly upset because of ICE's methods, which are often aggressive and brutal (imprison first ask questions weeks or months later).

3) not sure this is a question either. My parents have no idea how to play super mario, so culture changes quite a lot internally within seemingly culturally homogenous communities.

4) who gives a shit about colonialism. Its just ironic when yanks talk about "muh America" when their entire culture is one of being immigrants. I believe that's the reason people bring it up.

5) People are already "forced" to live together wanting different things. Every US election is like 50/50.

So idk how these questions are difficult. Also ICE go after legal migrants too, so this ain't just about "illegals". The irish guy who fucked his foot up and couldn't take his flight home went through every piece of due process possible and still got shit-canned. ICE are monstrous and oppressive.

It's probably easier to find an organization doing good work in one area than one looking at the whole picture, so if there's an issue you particularly care about, you should probably compare the leading organizations focusing on that issue.