Words | Jacqueline Samaroo
Young woman standing in dark cobblestone alley
When ICE agents moved through the upscale neighborhood of Lakeview in Chicago last fall, residents reacted in real time as word spread block by block and message by message. An entire squad of ICE agents had chased down a construction worker, who had then been handcuffed and shoved into a vehicle.
Courtney Conway, a forty-two-year-old Chicago resident, heard about the incident through Facebook groups and text message chains, and she hopped on her bike to join a group of protesters. “We are not a violent city. This is not a war zone, and I think these guys are terrorizing us and trying to incite us,” said Conway. “We want them out. We want them to stop kidnapping our neighbors.”
In an effort to defend themselves against the encroaching threat, residents have adopted whatever tactic they have available to them: some people are blowing whistles, messages are moving through Facebook groups and Signal chats, and some residents even go out to track where the agents are headed.
When ICE activity spikes, phones are being checked every few seconds as a deluge of notifications bounce information back and forth; some of these ICE-spotting Facebook pages in Chicago have up to 50,000 members. The overall responses are often fairly fast, but the information is also often highly fragmented and improvised. By the time some warnings come through, chases are already underway, and some people have already been roughed up or worse.
Several tech activists, such as Joshua Aaron, have created platforms that allow information to be shared more effectively, like the appropriately named app, ICEBlock.
Mobile phone app store screen for ICEBlock
Joshua Aaron is not the kind of figure who can be made to fit easily into a clean political story. A former musician turned tech entrepreneur, Aaron launched ICEBlock in April 2025 to help people spot possible immigration-enforcement activity in real time.
Aaron’s app was by no means revolutionary in the technology that it employed; in fact, he has been very candid that he modeled it on the crowd-reporting logic of driving apps.
Aaron has, however, stripped away all of the monetization and data collection that we have come to expect from apps like this. In an interview with Sam Wolfson from The Guardian, Aaron candidly put his reasoning for creating ICEBlock by simply stating, “I don’t care about people’s data. I care about keeping people safe.”
His logic is that people who are living with the constant possibility of a raid need a warning system, not a platform harvesting their attention or location history. In fact, ICEBlock has been designed to push fully anonymous sightings to nearby users and erase them hours later.
ICEBlock emerged as a direct response to the sharp escalation in immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, as Americans were seeing ICE expand its raids, courthouse arrests, and detention operations across the country. Reuters has reported that ICE arrests surged in 2025, including a major increase in arrests of people who entered the United States legally and were not hiding. Actions such as these have helped to foster the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that apps like ICEBlock were designed to respond to.
As one would expect, his brainchild was met with controversy almost immediately, drawing the attention of Trump administration officials who argued that the app could endanger agents.
This negative attention from government officials had a sort of “Streisand effect” which, in turn, made the app skyrocket in popularity. ICEBlock was released in April 2025, and by early June it had already amassed over 90,000 users. According to Aaron, after the additional attention from the press and government officials, ICEBlock had rapidly grown to more than one million users by October 2025.
It’s our duty as citizens of this nation to hold them accountable. — Joshua Aaron, ICEBlock founder
All the while, Aaron held his ground, with his framing of the app as protected speech and a practical tool, not a provocation or a threat. “When we see our government doing something wrong, it’s our duty as citizens of this nation to hold them accountable, and that is exactly what we’re doing with this lawsuit,” Aaron said while speaking with Reuters.
All of the friction that surrounds ICEBlock has also highlighted the remarkable fact of just how unremarkable Aaron is. Despite what he has put out into the world, he has never presented himself as a hero, and virtually no one has ever pushed that title onto him. He is just a node in a wider network of people trying to make a difference.
Crowd of people walking during sunset
As previously mentioned, the ideas behind the crowdsourced and crowd-reporting style of collective mapping that ICEBlock utilizes are much older than the app itself. In fact, to put things into perspective, even within its niche, ICEBlock is a newcomer in the grand scheme of things.
Open-source mapping tools like Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, and MapLibre have all paved the way by finding out what works (and what doesn’t) so that an app like ICEBlock can be effective… they walked so that ICEBlock could run.
Ushahidi describes its platform as a way to help communities “turn information into action” through crowdsourced reporting and mapping, while OpenStreetMap has become one of the world’s largest volunteer-built maps, which is constantly updated by users on the ground. MapLibre provides the open-source infrastructure that allows many of these projects to function independently of corporate mapping systems, and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has coordinated mapping efforts across ninety-four countries to support disaster response and humanitarian work.
Different tools, different crises or hurdles, all leading to the same impulse: using real-time information as a lifeline to help the powerless among us. Some fairly recent examples of this are the 2010 Haiti earthquake and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017.
In the aftermath of these disasters, volunteers with OpenStreetMap and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team rapidly mapped damaged roads, collapsed infrastructure, and isolated communities so rescuers and aid workers could navigate areas that commercial mapping systems failed to capture.
Similar open-source mapping efforts have since been used during the COVID-19 pandemic, refugee movements across the Sahel and Mediterranean, and now, today, in the once quiet neighborhoods we call home.
Ultimately, tools like ICEBlock and Ushahidi are just vessels that can direct the power of the human spirit, but the impulse would exist with or without them. As Baltazar Enriquez, president of Little Village Community Council in Chicago, so succinctly put it during his interview with Reuters about ICE activity in his community: “If we have to patrol our neighborhood for the next three years, we’re willing to do that just to keep our community safe.”
The maps built around them are rarely perfect, but they can still show where water is available, where a route has changed, where a checkpoint has appeared, or where a shelter is still open. In that sense, ICEBlock belongs to this same family of tools as the vital crisis-mapping platforms used in disasters and migration corridors alike.
Cardboard protest signs reading abolish ICE
Aaron has never asked for any recognition for his creation of ICEBlock, but regardless, his life has become noticeably more “complicated” since its creation.
Government officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have accused the app of helping people evade law enforcement, but Aaron has argued that the government is trying to punish protected speech.
According to Reuters, legal experts have weighed in on the matter and have come to the unanimous conclusion that “surveillance of immigration agents is largely protected under the US Constitution—as long [as] people don’t interfere with the agents’ work or encourage others to do so.”
Regardless, this hasn’t stopped forces larger than Aaron from moving against him and his family.
His wife, Carolyn Feinstein, was fired from her Department of Justice job in Austin, a move the couple believed was retaliation for the app. The administration denied that framing and said the firing was tied to concerns about her connection to the company that held ICEBlock’s intellectual property.
For Aaron, the attack made the fight feel less abstract: the app had moved from a tool on a phone to something that could enact consequences in his family’s life.
Currently, if you were to open the app store on your phone and search for ICEBlock, you would find the app missing, gone as if it never existed. This was not done willingly by Aaron, and there was no dramatic court case that you missed.
In October 2025, after pressure from the Trump administration and law enforcement complaints, Apple made the decision to remove ICEBlock from its App Store, claiming that it acted on information about safety risks. “We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place to discover apps,” Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.”
Aaron has been blunt about his motives, and he has since remained firm in his assertion that the government is trying to punish protected speech and has violated his First Amendment rights by pressuring Apple to remove the app, which had reportedly grown to more than one million users before the takedown.
“We are incredibly disappointed by Apple’s actions,” ICEBlock posted in its official response on its website. “Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move. Apple has claimed they received information from law enforcement that ICEBlock served to harm law enforcement officers. This is patently false.”
When we last checked ICEBlock’s official website, we saw that this unwavering resolve has not changed. In early December 2025, Aaron filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging free speech violations due to the removal of the app. Aaron has named several administration officials as defendants, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, ICE Director Todd Lyons, and Kristi Noem, who was serving as Homeland Security Secretary at the time.
The website itself reiterates that the tool was built without monetization or user tracking, and that existing installs still work even after Apple removed the app from the App Store: “If you currently have ICEBlock installed, it still works.”
Even as ICEBlock disappeared from official storefronts, users online began discussing alternatives, web-based workarounds, and other decentralized ways to share enforcement sightings. Alternative platforms and copycat tools have already appeared online, including web-based tracking maps and new Android apps like ICEbreaker and Eyes Up. On the other hand, due to Apple’s fight against ICE-tracking apps, some users have turned to mainstream platforms like Waze and Google Maps to quietly flag “icy conditions” as coded warnings about enforcement activity.
The fight hasn’t ended; it has simply spread into harder-to-control places.
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