Ankle monitors, curfews: Inside migrant tracking system
Biden program seeks to quickly process families
HEALDSBURG, Calif. — On a recent evening in California, a woman named Sandra was at a birthday party with her 15-yearold son when she glanced at the clock.
She started to panic: It was after 10 p.m.
She had less than an hour to get home in time for an 11 p.m. curfew set by US immigration authorities, part of a nearly yearold tracking system for migrant families who hope to be granted asylum in the United States.
She motioned to her son that they had to leave, and hustled him out the door and into the car.
They made it home at 10:58 p.m., the bulky GPS monitor on her right ankle pinging out her location to the authorities keeping track. Her heart, which had been slamming in her chest the whole ride home, finally slowed.
Sandra, 45, and her son Justin, who crossed the border in December after fleeing Colombia, are part of a Biden administration program that seeks to quickly process — and potentially deport — many of the migrant families who have arrived in the United States in record-breaking numbers.
The goal of the program is to keep families from skipping out on their asylum hearings and melting away into American society, joining the millions of people who stay in the country indefinitely, without legal permission.
If the families fail asylum screenings, they can be deported within weeks. The asylum process usually takes years, with most claims ultimately rejected.
So far, the Family Expedited Removal Management program has tracked more than 19,000 people since May, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was obtained by The New York Times.
More than 1,500 of them have been deported and around 1,000 have absconded by prying off their ankle monitors, the ICE data show. The rest either passed their initial screenings or still have cases underway.
Although the program has been used in only a fraction of claims, some US officials see it as a test case for a faster way to deal with families seeking refuge in America, where laws require the government to consider asylum claims from anyone who makes it onto US soil.
They hope the program can provide an alternative to the usual options for handling migrant families: detaining them in costly ICE facilities, which President Biden has criticized, or releasing them with court dates years in the future and no consistent way of tracking them.
Thomas Giles, an ICE official who runs the program, said it was showing signs of promise.
“It’s definitely increased our family unit removals over the last nine months compared to before, so it’s been successful with that,” he said.
But he cautioned that the program requires an enormous amount of resources and is still in the early days.
The immigration system, chronically underfunded and understaffed, cannot keep pace with the number of people who want asylum in America. Biden, in an election year with immigration as a dominant issue, is even said to be considering restricting asylum altogether.
There were more than 2.5 million migrant encounters at the southwest land border in fiscal year 2023, a record-breaking number that has strained resources in American cities.
The questions of how, where, and how long to detain migrants have confounded successive administrations. But the issue of what to do with families, in particular, has been among the most fraught, with ethical and political implications at every turn.
Years of scientific consensus show that detaining minors, even with their parents, can cause developmental damage. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all detained families in ICE facilities, hoping that the prospect of being locked up would deter them from making the trip.
The Biden administration made a point of ending family detention, instead releasing families with ankle bracelets and traceable cellphones. That model was a precursor to the new program, which uses strict curfews and expedited asylum screenings in addition to the electronic monitoring.
The program is being used in more than 40 locations with the resources to track thousands of migrants and make swift rulings in a make-or-break step of the asylum process: the credible fear interview.
In a functioning system, most people seeking asylum would be interviewed at the border to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution back home. But only about 500 such interviews are conducted every day — for a sliver of the thousands of people who cross.
The rest are often released into the country with a court date far in the future.
The new program aims to screen families and quickly deport those who don’t meet the bar for credible fear. Giles, the official who runs the program, said that ICE gives migrants a list of free legal service providers when they are processed into the program.
If they pass initial screenings, they can stay in the United States at least until their cases are concluded.
Sandra said she came to the United States as a last resort.
For years in Colombia, she ran a Christian organization aimed at helping the children of people addicted to drugs. It was, she said, her “dream job.”
But last year, she said, gang members threatened to kill her because she refused to help them sell drugs. She knew she had to leave.
“I didn’t want to come,” she said through a Spanish interpreter, asking that only her first name be used because of fears for her safety. “Many people come here because they are after the famous American dream, but that was not my case.”
In early December, Sandra and her son walked into Arizona and told Border Patrol they were afraid to return to Colombia, kick-starting the asylum process.
The case manager told Sandra that she was not a criminal but that this was part of Biden’s program to get things “under control,” she recalled.
“This is kind of humiliating in a way,” she said. “We know that we didn’t come here legally, but we didn’t have a way to do it legally.”