Apple Caves to Trump Pressure, deletes the application that allows immigrants to follow ice activity

Apple removed an application that allows immigrants to follow immigration and customs activity Thursday evening.

Iceblock, an application that has been launched in response to President Trump’s anti-immigrant repression, was modeled after the Google Crowdsourcée traffic application, and he gave users a Crowdsource means of reporting the nearby ICE activity.

“We have just received a message from the Apple application examination according to which #Iedblock was deleted from the App Store due to the” reprehensible content “. The only thing we can imagine is that this is due to the pressure of the Trump administrator. We have answered and we will fight this! #Resist,” said Iceblock in an article on Bluesky.

Iceblock received an intense backlash from Trump administration officials earlier this year. The acting director of the ICE, Todd Mr. Lyons, said that the application “mainly spent an objective on the federal back of law enforcement agents”, in a press release in June.

Prosecutor General Pam Bondi is now taking credit for withdrawal, telling Fox News that his office contacted Apple to demand that they delete the application

Earlier this summer, Bondi also consulted Fox News to openly threaten the founder of Iceblock, Joshua Aaron. “We look at him,” she said. “And it would be better to pay attention.” At that time, Bondi also said that she wanted to continue CNN for having broadcast a segment on the application.

The acting director of the ICE dismissal operations, Marcos Charles, also suggested that similar ice cream coil applications have been used in fatal filming in an ice installation in Dallas, although the shooter would have known the location of the installation without monitoring application.

“I am incredibly disappointed with Apple’s shares today. Capitulating towards an authoritarian regime is never the right decision,” Aaron told 404 media. “This is a discourse protected by the first amendment to the United States Constitution.”

“The information provided to Apple by the police show that your application violates directives 1.1.1 because its objective is to provide location information on law enforcement agents which can be used to harm these agents individually or as a group,” Aaron Read told Apple, according to 404 Media.

In 2019, Apple deleted a similar crowdsourcée application which allowed users to follow the movements of the Hong Kong police in the midst of Hong Kong demonstrations marked by police brutality. At the time, many Republican legislators were quick to criticize the decision and judge his censorship.

“American companies should never be censored or tell what by foreign opponents,” tweeted the Republican senator from Florida Rick Scott.

Iceblock was the number one on the App Store during the summer, while the Trump administration increased its policy of mass deportations and ice raids, as part of the president’s campaign promise to promulgate the “greatest deportation” in American history.

“In recent years, ice has been confronted with criticisms for the so -called abuse of civil rights and not to respect the constitutional principles and the regular procedure, which makes it crucial that communities remain informed of its operations,” writes the Iceblock website to explain why the application exists.

The application insists that it is completely anonymous, but this complaint has been disputed. Iceblock, the application does not keep a user activity database, but a download database is available on Apple, and Apple is also likely to follow the peripheral inscriptions for push notifications, according to the founders other confidentiality -oriented applications that spoke to the edge earlier this year. On the other hand, a third -party security researcher corroborated the allegations of privacy and anonymity of privacy and anonymity.

The application was available exclusively for iOS devices, so it is not difficult to know what the future contains for Iceblock and its users.