I keep thinking about where an ankle monitor sits on the body. It is low enough that people may pretend not to stare, but visible enough that they usually notice.
It can show beneath a dress, above a shoe, at work, at school pickup, during a medical appointment, or while someone is standing in line at the grocery store.
A stranger sees it and may immediately decide they know something about the person wearing it.
That is why I do not believe immigration ankle monitors are only about tracking someone’s location. They also create a public label—one that follows a person into every room and encourages others to see criminality before they see a human being.
That concern feels especially urgent after recent reporting from Ohio. At least a dozen Haitian immigrants from Springfield were reportedly summoned to in-person check-ins in Blue Ash and fitted with ankle monitors.
A private immigration matter was placed directly onto their bodies for the public to see.
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ICE calls electronic monitoring part of its Alternatives to Detention program, which allows certain immigrants to remain in their communities while their immigration proceedings continue. The agency can require different forms of supervision, including office visits, phone reporting, digital check-ins, and GPS monitoring.
But an ankle monitor is not socially neutral.
In the United States, people generally associate ankle monitors with criminal punishment. They see the device before they know whether the person has ever been convicted of a crime, missed an appointment, or posed any threat at all. The device speaks first.
It tells an employer that this worker is under government supervision. It tells a neighbor that this person is being watched. It tells a stranger that suspicion has already been attached to them, even when that suspicion has little to do with their individual conduct.
Recent reporting has described asylum seekers and other immigrants being fitted with monitors despite years of attending required check-ins. Wearers and their attorneys have reported physical discomfort, interrupted sleep, employment problems, shame, anxiety, and the stress of never knowing when the device may alert authorities or require charging.
This means the surveillance does not remain between ICE and the person being monitored. It brings employers, neighbors, customers, classmates, and strangers into the process.
Your immigration case becomes public before you choose to share it. Your body carries the announcement.
The government often presents electronic monitoring as a practical way to ensure that immigrants attend court hearings and appointments. But a 2021 report from the Cardozo School of Law’s Immigration Justice Clinic, Freedom for Immigrants, and the Immigrant Defense Project challenged the assumption that ankle monitors are needed to produce compliance.
The report, Immigration Cyber Prisons, drew from surveys of approximately 150 monitored immigrants, information from legal-service providers covering nearly 1,000 cases, and qualitative interviews. Its authors described physical injuries, psychological distress, employment consequences, privacy concerns, and racial disparities associated with electronic ankle monitoring.
The report also cited a 98 percent appearance rate for immigrants released without electronic ankle shackles. In other words, people were overwhelmingly attending immigration court and required appointments without having a GPS device locked to their bodies.
That number should force us to ask a harder question: If people are already complying, what problem is the ankle monitor solving?
There may be individual cases in which officials argue that closer supervision is necessary. But mass expansion is not individualized decision-making. It places the burden on immigrants to live under constant surveillance even when they have given the government no reason to assume they will disappear.
In June 2025, an internal ICE memo reportedly instructed officers to dramatically increase ankle-monitor use among people enrolled in the agency’s supervision program. At the time, roughly 24,000 people were wearing the devices, but the directive could have extended them to most of approximately 183,000 program participants.
By early 2026, the monitored population had already risen substantially, with reporting indicating that ankle-monitor use had nearly doubled within months.
This does not look like a carefully limited response to individual risk. It looks like a system choosing the most visible and restrictive option because it has the power to do so.
I keep returning to the visibility of the monitor because it changes the experience from being tracked to being marked.
A phone check-in can still be invasive. An app that requests a selfie can still violate privacy. Digital surveillance can still follow someone through their daily life.
But the ankle monitor carries an additional social message because the public already reads it as a sign of punishment.
A Haitian parent may know they have followed every instruction. Their child’s classmates do not know that.
An asylum seeker may understand that their case is still pending. A hiring manager may only see the device.
A person may know they have never been convicted of a crime. The stranger staring at their ankle may assume otherwise. The monitor gives the government’s suspicion more visibility than the person’s actual story.
This is how stigma works. It replaces complexity with a symbol and invites everyone else to respond to the symbol.
I hesitated before writing about the historical pattern because comparisons involving the Holocaust require care.
An ICE ankle monitor is not the same as the yellow badge that Jewish people were forced to wear under Nazi rule. The histories, intentions, scale, ideologies, and consequences are not interchangeable, and presenting them as identical would flatten the specific horror of the Holocaust.
But refusing a false equivalence does not mean refusing to learn from history.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that governments and religious authorities used identifying badges to mark Jewish people for centuries. Under Nazi rule, the badge became part of a systematic campaign to identify, stigmatize, segregate, control, deport, and ultimately murder European Jews.
The comparison is not that today’s policy has reached the same endpoint. The warning is about the mechanism.
A government chooses a marginalized group. It requires members of that group to carry a visible marker. The public learns to associate the marker with danger, inferiority, criminality, or exclusion. Treatment that once might have seemed shocking begins to look administratively normal.
Visible markers do not merely identify people. They can train the public to see those people differently.
That is what concerns me about ankle monitors being placed on immigrants who are living in their communities, raising families, working, attending appointments, and waiting for their cases to move through a civil legal system.
Once someone is visibly marked as suspicious, surveillance feels justified. Employment discrimination becomes easier to rationalize. Humiliation becomes a private inconvenience instead of a public concern.
Cruelty can hide inside paperwork and technology. History does not repeat itself in exactly the same form. That is why we have to recognize patterns before they reach the same conclusion.
There is also a financial story behind the expansion of immigrant surveillance.
ICE’s supervision program is operated in part by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of The GEO Group, one of the federal government’s largest immigration contractors. GEO provides detention, transportation, electronic monitoring, and other services to ICE.
According to Sahan Journal, BI received a two-year federal contract worth more than $1 billion to continue monitoring immigrants. The publication also reported that each person under supervision generated approximately $3.70 per day in revenue for GEO, while individual app-based check-ins could generate additional payments.
Those amounts may sound small when attached to one person for one day.
Multiply them by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, every day, and surveillance becomes a business model.
The Washington Post reported that the proposed expansion to roughly 180,000 ankle monitors could generate hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the contractor operating the program.
That financial incentive matters.
When a private company makes money each time another immigrant is added to a monitoring program, expansion is not only an enforcement decision. It is also a source of recurring revenue.
The government gains control. The company gains income. The immigrant absorbs the physical, emotional, professional, and social consequences.
We should be skeptical of a system in which a person’s restricted freedom becomes a profitable subscription.
An ankle monitor cannot tell us whether a person is dangerous.
It cannot tell us why they left home, what they survived, whether they have followed every instruction, or how many years they have spent trying to navigate a complicated immigration system.
It cannot tell us whom they love, what kind of parent they are, what they hope to build, or where they are trying to feel at home.
It tells us only that the government has chosen to watch them.
Yet immigrants are already reduced to categories before many people hear their stories: documented or undocumented, admissible or removable, useful or burdensome, deserving or undeserving.
A visible monitor adds another label.
Beauty of Belonging exists because immigrant lives are larger than the systems used to classify them. We should not have to prove exceptional achievement, economic usefulness, perfect behavior, or endless gratitude before others agree that we deserve dignity.
And we should not have to wear the government’s suspicion on our bodies.
I do not want us to grow accustomed to seeing immigrants visibly marked by the state. I do not want a piece of plastic locked around someone’s ankle to decide how we see them before they have the chance to speak.
The monitor is designed to make government power visible. Our responsibility is to keep the immigrant, the human being, visible too.
What happens to a community when government surveillance becomes something everyone can see—but few people are encouraged to question?
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Gwen Lane is a Filipina American immigrant, writer, founder, and cultural commentator behind Beauty of Belonging—an independent publication exploring immigrant identity, beauty, ambition, cultural power, and what it means to feel at home. Subscribe, share, and upgrade to a paid subscription to support independent immigrant-led media that centers immigrant identity, dignity, and belonging.
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