Yudis hasn’t felt the same since she was placed on an ankle monitor by federal immigration officials nearly a year ago.
Her ankle swells, her menstrual cycle has changed and she’s experienced nosebleeds.
Yudis — who asked that her full name not be published because of her pending immigration case — said she was surprised when immigration officials placed an ankle monitor on her after she crossed over the southern border into the United States with her then-15-year-old pregnant daughter.
This November will mark one year since Yudis, who moved to the Chicago suburbs because a friend from Venezuela had settled there, was placed on electronic monitoring with no end in sight. Her husband remains in Venezuela while a son migrated to California.
“It’s horrible,” the 46-year-old said in Spanish. “Since putting that monitor on my foot, my whole body has changed.”
The number of people being monitored electronically by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Chicago field office has grown by more than 555% in the past five years. That percentage includes people monitored by ICE who live in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky and Kansas.
There were 2,921 people on some form of electronic monitoring in September 2019. That number jumped to 19,160 last month, according to an analysis from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
People being monitored by ICE’s Chicago field office are placed in the program for an average of almost two years.
The agency did not respond to questions about the specific Chicago field office statistics and why it’s grown so much. In an email, the agency said the number of people it is monitoring across the country has decreased from 321,000 people in the 2022 fiscal year to 194,427 people in the 2023 fiscal year. In its annual report, ICE said that could have been because of fewer people being placed under monitoring at the southern border and because more people are being terminated from these types of programs.
This summer, Chicago surpassed the San Francisco field office in having the highest number of people enrolled in these types of monitoring programs, said Adam Sawyer, a research associate with TRAC.
“It’s been going up consistently for awhile,” Sawyer said. “Every time it came out, I was noticing Chicago was inching up and San Francisco was kind of holding steady.”
Electronic monitoring ranges from an ankle monitor to a device that resembles a smart watch.
Most people — more than 15,700 — are enrolled in a program called SmartLINK that ICE has used since fiscal year 2018, which is a phone app that uses facial recognition technology and GPS to monitor compliance, according to its website.
The monitoring of immigrants by ICE started to expand during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
The passage of Illinois Way Forward — which banned local jails from detaining people facing deportation — could be among the factors leading the increase, he said.
“I would like to think that Illinois Way Forward and the closure of the jails just pointed out to ICE locally that a lot of these people really didn’t need to be jailed,” Tsao said. “Half of the people who were being jailed when Illinois Way Forward kicked in ultimately got released.”
Cesar, who lives in the suburbs, had been held at an Illinois jail detaining immigrants until he was released when the law went into effect.
He had to wear an ankle monitor for about a year, before he was placed in SmartLINK. He asked that his full name not be published because he remains under electronic monitoring by ICE.
“The alternative to me having this monitor on was being detained or deported to Mexico,” Cesar said. “So of course to me, the monitor was the best outcome because I was with my family.”
Still, he noticed the way people looked at him when he was in public with his children. After about a year, officials agreed to remove the ankle monitor and he was placed in SmartLINK monitoring, he said.
For two years, he’s had to submit a selfie weekly through SmartLINK, an app he keeps on his cell phone that uses facial recognition technology and GPS to monitor his compliance.
“I work at a warehouse so when I take the pictures they probably see a bunch of boxes, a brick building in the background,” he said.
Cesar, who has lived in the Chicago suburbs since the 1990s, said he also has certain travel restrictions, and he’s had to navigate the bureaucracy of getting approval to go on vacation outside of the Midwest with his wife and five children.
He isn’t sure if he should still be monitored, and he doesn’t know when it will end. Cesar said he’s still trying to adjust his immigration status.
The federal agency says it determines what type of technology should be used to monitor a person by factoring in the person’s immigration case status, if they are a caregiver or provider, community ties, criminal history and the person’s history of compliance with the agency, according to an email from ICE. Those factors are also used to weigh if a person should be removed from its monitoring programs.
Because of the uncertainty surrounding his case, Cesar said he hasn’t wanted to legally challenge his monitoring. He recalls the nearly two years he spent in immigration detention and thinks his situation could be worse.
“To me, being with my family, being in the community, being able to breathe fresh air, to me, the alternative to detention that I’m on works for me,” he said. “And it’s OK for me.”
Karina Solano, a Chicago-based immigration community organizer, said people are afraid to ask ICE to remove them from the program out of fear of retaliation.
“A lot of people are really nervous about doing anything that’s going to seem like they don’t want to comply with things,” Solano said. “ICE is not telling them how to get out of this program.”
Solano and other immigration advocates say some of the newly arrived immigrants in Chicago are among those who are being electronically monitored by immigration officials.
She said some people have been monitored for five years. Solano said she thinks the federal agency’s program is misleading because she doesn’t consider it an alternative to detention, even with the newer forms of monitoring.
“I think that they are trying to make it seem like, well, now you won’t be as stigmatized when it’s something that’s more discreet like an app or a watch,” she said. “But that’s not the problem. The problem is the surveillance aspect of it, and how it’s used to make deportations happen easier and in larger numbers.”
Yudis, who was placed on an ankle monitor after she entered the U.S. from Venezuela, points to a spot on her leg.
Pat Nabong/Sun-Times
For Yudis, she’s worried about the long-term health effects of wearing an ankle monitor. She’s noticed spots on her right leg above the monitor, and she often has trouble sleeping because of the position of the device.
Other immigrants who have been placed on electronic monitoring have reported physical and mental side effects ranging from aches to cramps to anxiety, according to an academic article titled, “Immigration Detention Abolition and the Violence of Digital Cages,” published this year in the University of Colorado Law Review.
On a recent morning, a red glow emitted from the device as she charged it and listened to religious music in the bedroom she shares with her teen daughter and granddaughter. She had planned to ride her bike to check out a job lead, though she said people have rejected her after seeing the monitor.
“This is very uncomfortable,” Yudis said in Spanish. “It makes people look at you as if you were a criminal because people say ankle monitors are for prisoners. So it’s shameful for me.”
She said immigration officials placed the monitor on her leg after she crossed from Mexico into El Paso, Texas, last November.
She was told to report to the Chicago field office but she wasn’t told how she could be removed.
“I’m going on one year. They should realize — because they see where you are going … that the person isn’t doing bad things.”