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WASHINGTON — Apple has quietly removed DeICER, a civic-reporting app used to log immigration enforcement activity, from its App Store after a law enforcement complaint — invoking a rule normally reserved for protecting marginalized groups from hate speech.
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According to internal correspondence reviewed by Migrant Insider, Apple told developer Rafael Concepcion that the app violated Guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” directed at “religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”
But Apple’s justification went further. “Information provided to Apple by law enforcement shows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group,” the company wrote in its removal notice.
The decision effectively treats federal immigration agents as a protected class — a novel interpretation of Apple’s hate-speech policy that shields one of the most powerful arms of government from public scrutiny.
In an exclusive Tuesday-night interview, Concepcion — a former professor of journalism at Syracuse University — said the app had roughly 30,000 users before it disappeared from the App Store this week.
He launched DeICER in February, initially as a “know your rights” app, before layering a map function that allowed users to log sightings of immigration enforcement activity.
“It isn’t meant to harvest people,” Concepcion said. “It is meant to inform people.”
The app’s design was deliberately minimalist and privacy-focused. DeICER was token-based and collected no personally identifiable data “in case DHS came to raid the technology for usable data,” Concepcion explained.
Each pin on the map automatically expired after four hours, roughly the amount of time he assumed an ICE raid might last. “Users had to be GPS-tagged within a quarter mile of where they were posting — but that’s adjustable,” he said. “Images are taken at the moment in time and cross-referenced with GPS.”
Concepcion said he drew inspiration from Witness, a human rights media project co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel in the 1980s to help citizens document abuses on video. “That’s what I was thinking about when I built this — Witness for the immigration era.”
Concepcion’s appeal to Apple emphasized that DeICER was “a tool for education and lawful civic engagement, not the targeting or tracking of law enforcement.”
“Users cannot follow, locate, or monitor officers in real time,” he wrote in his memo to Apple’s App Review Board. “Any observation entered in the app represents a single moment in time, not a persistent or live tracking function.”
He also noted that the app’s optional photo and video uploads were consistent with First Amendment protections upheld by multiple federal courts, including Glik v. Cunniffe and ACLU v. Alvarez.
But Apple rejected that reasoning. In its final ruling, the company’s App Review Board upheld the removal, stating: “Information provided to Apple by law enforcement shows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 … because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
The decision mirrors Apple’s earlier correspondence almost word for word — suggesting the company deferred to law enforcement’s judgment rather than conducting an independent review.
Apple’s decision marks a quiet but consequential shift in how the tech giant applies its anti-harassment rules. A guideline written to protect minorities from hate speech is now being used to protect federal agents from public accountability.
While Apple is a private company and not bound by the First Amendment, the move raises alarms among civil-liberties advocates who see it as a corporate extension of state secrecy.
By applying protections meant for vulnerable groups to shield government actors, Apple has created — within its own ecosystem — a new kind of protected class: state power itself.
Concepcion says he plans to continue appealing the decision and is exploring alternative hosting options.
“Recording public officials is not harassment,” he said. “It’s democracy.”
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