The ICE List opened a public beta today of a ICE Watch web app, a mobile web tool that asks a narrow question of anyone who has stood on a U.S. street while immigration enforcement worked it: do you have footage of these incidents, or have you seen these agents.
The app runs in a browser, installs to a home screen without an app store, and opens onto a stack of documented incidents that the project's archive has recorded but cannot yet show. We are unlikely to ever reach a stage where the Android or Apple app stores will ever accept this app into their store, but we are certainly going to try get it listed.
We are starting with a limited beta, 200 users who can be served our current version of the app. Access will expand to more users slowly as we tighten controls on our end, with the eventual goal of full public access.
Swipe past what incidents and agents you did not see in the public, swipe right when you recognise an agent or incident. If you do recognise something and know something, add a link, a note, or the video itself. We are pulling some unidentified agents from the project's record of those unidentified, in these cases, we really want to try get in front of people who know the agents.
Submissions are anonymous, land in a queue only authorised reviewers can open, and publish nothing until a person has checked them. The tool does not request location access, and the project does not host residential addresses, family details, or contact information for anyone. We maintain the goal of only using publicly available information to create profiles on agents and incidents.
A note: Senator Marsha Blackburn's Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act named the project directly, on the theory that recording what federal agents do in public constitutes an attack on them. The record the tool is built from consists of public actions by public officials, sourced to publicly available material, and the all our choices have been made to maintain this entirely public facing record keeping.
What the beta is actually testing is the review workflow and the UI, which is why the first round is capped at both users and content, and later arrivals will be sent to a waitlist. A queue of unverified footage is worth very little, and a queue nobody can process is worth less than that. The bet here is that the evidentiary gap in how enforcement operations get documented is not a shortage of witnesses but a shortage of routes from a phone camera to a public record, and that closing it is a matter of plumbing. Whether the Trump regime finds that more objectionable than the footage itself, we will find out shortly.
Users can expect rapid changes to the app in the first days as we learn throughout this beta period. We would already like to thank any of you who choose to sign up and help us.
Disclosure: Crust News and the ICE List share a founder. Both projects are funded by readers.
